Do you know what you do not know?
4/4/11
Grace and Peace Friend,
Have you ever though about what you do not know? Keeping a clean house for myself was never a priority in my life until I met a woman named Fannie. I’ve scrubbed countless toilets, and up until meeting Fannie, there was not much that could phase me from a dirt perspective.
However, Fannie was referred to me as a client and as I began services for her home, I was shocked to discover how filthy her home would become after just two weeks! Compared to my other clients, I could not figure out how one small family could create such a combination of clutter and dirt in just a short amount of time!
After several months of service (with the home back to its filthy state every other week when I arrived), Fannie requested that I do a one-time cleaning of her mother’s home four hours away, where her sister had been living. While normally I tried to keep my service area local, I decided to make an exception for this recurring client (and frankly this was the stage in the business where I would do just about anything to get the revenue up!) So two Saturdays from then, I recruited a friend and we embarked on our roadtrip to go a’ scrubbin’.
We arrived to discover that Fannie’s mother’s house where her sister had been living was filthy beyond what I could have ever imagined! Neither a vacuum nor a single cleaning product had touched any surface in this house…possibly ever. Decades of smoke, grease, and dirt layered in the kitchen. Apparently at one point there had been raccoons that had come through the attic and, as we later learned, had been retained as pets by the sister in one of the bathrooms. Yet another room we were unable to touch at all because it (the room, that is) was used as the cat’s permanent litter box.
As I spent my day in that house of my client’s mother and sister, chiseling and scrubbing as I could, I realized something: My client, Fannie, whose house was by far the dirtiest house on an every other week basis out of all of my clients, actually had a well-kept, sanitary home in comparison to what she had likely experienced as a child. Fannie knew that her home was cleaner than what she had grown up with, yet she was clueless that still most homes were kept much cleaner than her own. Fannie did not know what she did not know.
This “Fannie” experience helped me begin to think that surely I must also have blind spots in my own life- that just as Fannie has set her life course based on the standard she had known without realization of a different norm- that there could be areas in my life where I did not know what I did not know.
We all set the course of our lives based on our other experiences. Fannie was doing amazingly well compared to how she had grown up but I don’t think she understood that there is a completely different way to live (that did not involve a filthy house!). So many times we live life completely out of our experience. I began asking the Lord to please show me what areas of my life I live like Fannie! I slowly began to see how I had let the things I knew from my experiences influence my thought processes, communication, and the way I related to people, money and food.
The greater challenge to myself was to begin examining my own “glasses” of experience to be able to differentiate between what I see through those glasses and what is truly there. When we set out on what we believe is a true and right, do we know that we are seeing truth, or is it only just a slightly better version compared to our own experiences that looks like truth to us?
In unlocking “the creative” in our lives, the first step is to learn to check our blind spots so that we can orient our own perspective. This is an ongoing life journey- to discover the things we do not know. How does one even begin? Start with cultivating curiosity.
Blessings,
Wendy
PS- Fannie later stopped services for unknown reasons and I didn’t hear from her. Several years later, my sister, Jessica, returned to the office from a Carpe Diem Cleaning consultation, and proclaimed, “I just did an estimate for every two week services for a client whose home is the worst possible home we could possibly have ever taken on! I even stepped in dried dog poop in the living room during the consultation!” She didn’t tell me the name of our new client, but I secretly thought that this new home was probably close to what Fannie’s had been like. Well, a few weeks later, I was reviewing the list of new clients, and guess who had returned? :-)
