Clean up your room!
6 of 10 in the series ‘Children Home Rules - They’re Not Just for Kids’
Here at W. Kim Tae Kwon Do, we have a set of rules that we give every child that joins our program. This list is called Children Home Rules. Basically, it’s a set of rules that aren’t any different from the rules that parents already have at home. They aren’t new, but they serve as a handy tool for reinforcement.
Children Home Rule #6 -
Children must keep their own room neat and clean.
We’ve all made messes in our lives. In some cases there are portions of our lives that still house some of those messes.
Mine is the garage. More on that later.
Everyone looks at life in different ways and that’s okay. But there is something about being a bit more organized that does feel good.
No matter what kind of upbringing we had, our parents tried their best to help us be responsible and create self-discipline.
For some, the training our parents tried to instill fell by the wayside when we became teenagers. For others the freedoms of college disrupted that training.
No matter when it may have happened, at some point we had to face the fact that we needed to take responsibility for our lives and hearken back to the self-discipline that our parents tried to instill in us.
As kids we weren’t really responsible for much. We had our bed, toys, and clothes as our world. The mantra ‘If you’re done playing with it, put it away’, still rings true in many households today. (For me, getting into a bed that was made that morning means that I’m not fighting with covers that had previously gotten skewed the night before. That makes going to bed even better!)
As an adult, the myriad of things that pop up on a daily basis can end up being a little overwhelming, especially if you have kids. Carefully laid plans can be disrupted by the most basic of things. We always intend to get to things after the disruptions have been solved.
Good intentions, unfortunately, don’t get the chores done.
Back to my garage. I’m not proud of the way it looks right now. Some of those unplanned things that life brings up made their way into my garage as a by-product. But I can honestly say that I know where everything is(well, most everything). It’s organized after a fashion.
Can it be better? Absolutely! In all honesty when I have the time to focus and dedicate to it, I enjoy having a neat and clean garage. In fact, just writing this post has gotten me motivated to set aside some time to get it into a better state of presentation.
I believe there are two things that get in the way of our commitment to being organized and self-disciplined.
Laziness and Procrastination.
There is so much that fuel those two. Don’t get me wrong - sometimes it is absolutely necessary to take some time and just veg out. Maybe it’s watching TV or reading a book. Those are fine, but we can’t let them dictate our priorities. Laziness and Procrastination are great at contributing to our stress level. It’s easy to shut off the brain while watching TV. And we are all fantastic at reasoning with ourselves, coming up with logical arguments why sitting on the couch rather than doing the dishes makes sense at the time. And then we see the mountain of dishes and it becomes overwhelming.
The Holiday season doesn’t help the situation either since there is so much more to do. However, whether it’s in the next few days or an opportunity to make a fantastic New Years resolution,I would encourage you to take control and organize what you can when you have the time to do it. We all have something that we’ll get to eventually. Make a plan and get to it!
Me? I’m off to my garage.
Photo Credit: Louis Turner
