Geeks Vs Loneliness: the importance of cleaning your windows

Geeks Vs Loneliness, chums, is the bit on the site where we try and chat about things that may be affecting you, or people around you. Miracle cures are not offered, but we do try and come up with tips that may be of use somewhere along the line. We do appreciate that everyone is different, though!

This week, then, just a simple tip.

Once of this parish is a splendid person by the name of Sarah. She co-launched this site with me back in the day, and has gone on to do lots of impressive and incredible things. I love her writing, and there’s something she penned on her blog a while back that has stuck with me since. I think it’s something worth sharing.

She wrote a post about things she’s learned in life, and in it, she cited something musician Ian MacKaye had told her. It was about how to deal with bad days in life, and stresses. To quote her directly, Sarah wrote this:

“This is something Ian MacKaye told me in an interview once, and it stuck with me. If you’re feeling miserable, clean your windows. You might or might not feel better afterwards, he said, but at least you’ll have clean windows. It doesn’t have to be windows, obviously; you could clean your oven or scrub your bathtub or whatever, but doing something physical that gives you visible results can often help with feeling depressed.

(He also told me that if you want to clean sticky label residue off something, you need to rub a bit of vegetable oil on it, and this also turned out to be amazing advice.)”

I can’t speak for the vegetable oil bit, but the cleaning windows is a wonderful tip. The idea of just doing something in the midst of a dark day, making progress with one little job. I love that a lot, and whilst my windows are a disgrace, I’ve certainly used the idea behind it lots of times over the past year. I can vouch for it.

Lots of you, I suspect, have different tips, and please do share them in the comments. Until next time, though, thanks, as always, for reading. Stay awesome.