Just yesterday, I was updating my children’s baby books, which involved me reflecting on questions about the kids at their particular stages (what traits does your child share with you? How does your child interact with their siblings and cousins?) and me asking them to fill in the blanks on a list of favorites: books, friends, foods, and so on. I always enjoy hearing their answers, as they typically either surprise me with laughter or hit the nail on the head in a warmly reassuring way, but my seven year old’s answer to “favorite things to do” delighted me on a whole new level. She didn’t skip a beat and immediately answered: “deep cleaning. I LOVE deep cleaning.” 

Sweet daughter of mine. Oh, how I relate.  I will gladly fill a Saturday morning deep cleaning everything from rooms in my home, to our family cars, to my desk at work, to my purse. There is truly nothing quite like restoring a space to a state of organized, fresh-smelling, dust-free perfection, and I find both the act of deep cleaning and the finished product intensely satisfying. 

Deep cleaning doesn’t stop with physical spaces. We can deep clean our phones, our calendars, our relationships, our mindsets, our attitudes, and our time management. In other words, we can deep clean our hearts. Given that both the calendrical season of Spring and the liturgical season of Lent are upon us, now is a great time to seek a spiritual refresh by cleaning out the clutter of the heart.

Here are some questions to consider and some practices to try as a way of guiding the process.

Keep a time log for a week

Annie Dillard, the writer and naturalist, wrote: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” In any given week, we sleep (or at least I sleep!) a substantial percentage of our weekly 168 hours, and there are the predictable, immovable hours of commuting, work and other regular obligations. But then, for most of us, there are the rest of the hours, some of which likely go to meaningful purposes like catching up with our family members, prayer and exercise, but some of which are also likely frittered away — on scrolling social media, on browsing retail sites, on talking to ourselves in the mirror. 

Keeping a log for a week can help us to inventory our time use and determine where we may be wasting more time than we realize. It can also help us assess whether or not we’re devoting the time we’d like to be devoting to the people and things that are most important to us. In other words, a time log, much like an examination of conscience, can push us towards making an honest inventory of our spent time. And this is the first step in re-orientation towards spending time in a way that most aligns with our priorities and values. 

Examine your conscience 

Speaking of the examination of conscience… there are so many good ones! An examination of conscience really just involves reflecting prayerfully on one's thoughts, words, and deeds in order to identify any sins, and it’s a practice that one should definitely complete before the Sacrament of Penance as a means of preparation. But examinations aren’t reserved only for times of receiving the Sacrament, and they can be used as a tool to identify areas where change need to occur in your life. The United States Council of Catholic Bishops offers quite a few guides for examining your conscience in different contexts, but you could also get highly specific and google for yourself “Examination of Conscience for… [parents, daughters, teachers, wives, etc.]. 

Notice where peace of mind dips 

My husband and I often joke that at his worst, mentally and emotionally, he’s despairing, while at my worst, I’m furious. In his lowest moments of parenting, working and being in relationship, he is overcome by moroseness, whereas in mine, I’m clouded by irritability. What can I say? We have very different personalities. But what we share is that our growing edges hinder the same thing: peace of mind. At the end of spring refresh of the heart, I think we’d both like to have a greater peace of mind, and so the task at hand is to notice the moments when the opposite of peace arises. For me, this means paying attention to when irritation flares. A look at my last twenty-four hours reveals shows me that I fell somewhere on the spectrum of annoyed to irate when I was running late to work and stuck behind a school bus, when all my kids were talking to me at once, and when I read an email on my phone from a complaining client as I was winding down for the night. 

The next step, then, is to consider what I can do to lessen the emotional impact of these triggers. I have to drive to work, but I can leave a cushion of time so that delays don’t cause me stress. My kids are chatty, but in a calm moment I can have a talk with them about interrupting, and I can seek out one on one time with each child so that they don’t feel as if they have to compete for my attention. Work email isn’t going anywhere, but I can confine reading it to working hours and spaces. All of these simple changes can keep me in a more peaceful place. 

St. Augustine wrote in one of his sermons: 

“On earth, we are wayfarers, always on the go. This means that we have to keep on moving forward. Therefore, be always unhappy about what you are if you want to reach what you are not. If you are pleased with what you are, you have stopped already. If you say: ‘It is enough,’ you are lost. Keep on walking, moving forward, trying for the goal. Don’t try to stop on the way, or to go back, or to deviate from it.”

The seasons of Spring and Lent are wonderful times to consider how we can be moving forward, purifying our hearts and lives.