Earlier today I was talking with a friend and it came up that they were tired of mending old things. I thought to myself that they must be tired of repairing antique and vintage furniture since they often do repair old things of such a nature but they were talking about healing past traumas and pain! That’s when it dawned on me that maybe the simple act of mending old things like furniture is the more complicated act of mending our hearts as well.

I started to think about the overlap between doing chores around the house like mending clothes, washing and drying the laundry, doing the dishes, tidying up around the house and how that intersected with ways that we might feel about other things in our lives. Does cleaning up around the house look like the way that we heal?

In many ways, mending the past is taking care of the chores that have piled up from things you’ve done that are now passed. Washing a stain from a bad day off your clothes, throwing away the food from that terrible restaurant experience, making your bed after being too depressed to get up for the past few days… these are all ways that we mend the past through chores.

And sometimes the pasts that we’re mending are psychological, are within us emotionally and those make it difficult to fully show up for our home duties. We don’t have the energy after feeling so emotionally distraught to wash the dishes or to shower. We don’t have the energy to change the sheets or sweep the floor. And these are all things that we know on some level but maybe don’t connect as a form of healing.

It makes sense to see chores as a form of healing or shadow work when you think about the ways that taking care of chores can change your mood. Think about the advice to go exercise when you’re feeling down or get some sunshine. The same can be said about taking a shower, making your bed, tidying up your space– these are all recommendations to shift the energy in your body, mind, and space to help boost your mood. And this is because we’re mending the past in order to create a present moment where we feel a little more connected to balance and harmony.

So maybe when we’re taking care of chores, we can see it as an investment not just in the physical space but also the emotional and spiritual one as well.

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