Habits v's Guilt

Today has me thinking about the way to make a new habit. All the experts say, do something for 30 consecutive days and its a habit. Great. In my experience about all I manage in 30 consecutive days is eating and sleeping (the blog hasn't made it that far even). However I do have some thoughts on the tricky balance between trying to create a new habit, and being swamped by guilt and despair at being unable to stick at anything for 30 days. This line of thought is triggered by circumstances today. Not only am I still up at the hospital with Dad trying to get him enough pain relief, but my elder daughter came down with flu-like symptoms and needed a close eye for a while there. So my plans to conquer the lawn went awry about 10am. Although the mower and the lawn had a pretty big get together before that and between us, my husband and I mowed about 1/3 of the block. Go us!

Then there was juggling the whole sick girl, pained father issue. It basically took over the day. Spending a bit of it reading "The Hobbit" aloud to my sick girl and both of us falling asleep took up a few hours! I'll write more about that another time. What I am realising however is that the past few days, allocating 'extra' time to cleaning the house is what I need to be doing every day. Not just sometimes. Because life will continue to happen, not every day is going to give me a free 3 hours to declutter. I can apply the pricipal I learnt when pregnant with my eldest child. In order to prevent gestational diabetes, I took up exercise. My husband and I walked every evening for 20 minutes around the neighbourhood. Those walks became a daily routine. But there were days they didn't happen. sometimes even multiple days in a row. Normally after a few days of missed walking I'd be so filled with guilt and it would serve only to hold me back and make getting out the door bigger than ben hur and too big a deal, too hard. What I learnt 9 years ago however (and seem to have forgotten) is that it doesn't matter if you miss a day, or how many days you miss. All you need to do is pick yourself up and keep going. Just don't 'stop' or even think that you've stopped. I need to apply this principle to my cleaning.

In my case its not just about swimming, but how much swimming! I need to remember to keep swimming at least 2 hours a day to get any progress! I find I've been unable to do this as yet, but from here on the idea is to just transfer that mindset from evening walks to devoting sufficient time to the cleanliness of the house. It just simply has to be done. Too many years and too much illness and neglect. The time to change all of it is now. I also had a scary thought I'll be saving for later. If I have too much stuff to look after, then I need less stuff to make life easier!!! OR, what I'm trying first, is spending more time every day on upkeep.