Cleaning up

Yesterday I cleaned my entire place. This time, I cleaned all of the windows, too. They looked like leopard patterned windows because of the rain and dust, since I didn’t clean the windows for a long time.

While I was cleaning the windows I remembered a question which was asked me before — “What would you do if you could wipe the slate clean?” When I was asked that question, I didn’t really think about it. But this time, while the dirty windows were getting to be clean, it reminded me of it.

“What would I do if I could wipe the slate clean?” I couldn’t come up with anything. It didn’t mean that I haven’t done anything bad or wrong; of course, I have some… no, many regrets.

If I could see my future like in the American TV drama “Flash Forward,” if my future was horrible I would try to avoid it. I also wish I could see my past by stepping into a time machine and give some advice to me like the Japanese animation “Doraemon.” But actually, I don’t want to erase anything that I felt or thought or did from my past. Even though they were bitter, sad and awful, they are parts of my history.

Even if only one piece was missing from my past, my life would change a lot. If I changed my past I wouldn’t be in the same situation as I’m now. Maybe I could have been happier, or have a brighter future, but I wouldn’t want to lose lots of memories that I can’t buy, whether they were good or bad.

As I said, I’m not completely satisfied with my past and current situation. Also, I sometimes do things I regret, especially when I’m drunk. I have a lot of embarrassing memories that I hate to talk about, but I don’t want to sweep them clean. That’s because I’ve enjoyed my life up to now and I believe I’m a lucky person. I’m surrounded by many nice people who always care for me, help me and have good time with me. Even if a super horrible thing happens to me I’m sure I can get over it, and I’ve done so. When I’m really feeling down, they always help me out of the dark situation I’m in. Once the nightmare changes into a good old memory, we can drink for several hours while talking and laughing about it. I can appreciate the importance of them, and enjoy having drinks with them, because of my terrible past.

I think everything which happens to me has a meaning or a reason. About 11 years ago, I lost my father suddenly. Unfortunately, until he died, I couldn’t recognize how much I was protected by him and I had a happy life because of him, which I took for granted. His death was an unthinkable sorrow, but it opened my eyes and taught me how awfully happy things were.

I always try to think like that when I have to overcome hard situations — think of my happy sweet histories as chocolate bars, and think of my bad awful histories as potato chips. If I always eat only chocolate bars, I’ll be tired of eating them and I won’t feel they’re sweet or good, even though they’re awesome. Then, I will definitely want to eat something salty. Here comes potato chips. If I eat potato chips in between chocolate bars, I can really enjoy tasty chocolate bars more than when I eat only them. In the same way, we’ll lose feelings of the happiness, if we only experience dreamlike things. We can’t appreciate our current situations even if we’re happy now. We sometimes feel fear, anger, sadness or disappointment in our daily life. Because of that, we can find happiness, and we strive to be happy or try to make our life better.

For me, the nightmare things give me a chance to take a closer look at my attitude, behavior, situation and myself. They also give me a chance to realize that I’ve earned my place in the sun. I think that a bad event sometimes has the possibility to become a kind of a spice of our life, depending on how we accept it.

After the cleaning, I looked at the windows again. The shiny beautiful windows are OK, but the dirty leopard patterned windows were not so bad. If I see them from a different angle, I can enjoy feeling like I’m at a safari park even though I’m in my house. In the future, maybe I’ll face a variety of issues that I want to eliminate from my life. Even so, I want to trust that I can overcome them and change them into good memories. It’s just like how I miss the leopard patterned windows now. So, my answer to the question is this — “Nothing. In my life, there is nothing that I want to wipe clean. I don’t need to clean up anything.”