A Fresh Start
A fresh start. That sounds so good doesn’t it. Fresh…fresh like fresh food, fresh like fresh air, fresh like fresh laundry from the dryer and fresh sheets on the bed. Fresh like a great shower at the end of a long day, fresh like a new haircut, new clothes, new makeup. Fresh like a clean car or a clean house.
Many a candle, deodorant, and fragrance has the word “fresh” in it. Fresh sounds good. Smells good. Feels good. Is good??
But fresh without dealing with the rotten is not so fresh.
When I was in high school, the Bath & Body Works scent Plumeria was popular. Everywhere you went around school, you would smell it–we had Plumeria lotion and body spray. To this day, I cannot stand the smell…because I am reminded of Plumeria mixed with body odor. That was the smell you got in the locker room. Plumeria couldn’t ever cover the smell of a bunch of 15 year old girls after PE. It’s not Plumeria’s fault though–the smell was as strong as it was on a clean body devoid of sweat and body odor—it was our fault. What we needed was a shower, not a body spray. A body spray on top of a shower would have been even better. A shower and deodorant and body spray and lotion would have been perfection but given the 5 min we had between PE ending and the start of the next class, we were left with body spray, deodorant and putting back on our school uniform instead of our damp PE clothing. But let’s be real, we smelled the rest of the day. And the locker room permanently smelled of BO and Plumeria.
No matter how fresh the new fresh thing is, you need to cleanse the old first or the fresh won’t stay. It will sour with the old and it will sour quick because a fresh thing cannot freshen up rotten. Nothing is that fresh.
New and fresh only work when you do the work to clean or repair what was rotten or broken. I have been known to try to cover rotten and broken myself with something new and fresh and smell good. That’s an easy button we press so we do not have to do the hard work of repair. Repair is the cleansing that needs to take place before the new scent.
The truth is that I have been forced into fresh and new. I am not excited about it in the way that someone who chooses this path would be but it doesn’t change the fact that I still need to shower off the old before I can expect fresh and new to last. Most days it feels like I am applying fresh lotion and then getting in the shower, working backwards. I hope to move to the right order of things but when you are forced into fresh and new without wanting it, you stink walking in. Your BO is exposed and it permeates to everything around you. Fixing the rotten while you are in the fresh is a weird place to be. Everything feels upside down and I am definitely doing things out of order–literally and figuratively. But I am showering daily, scrubbing the rough parts off, cleaning before spraying the new scent, putting on fresh clothing everyday, trying fresh things everyday, embracing the newness I did not ask for while trying to come to terms with the stinky past. And while it is always better to clean before you spray the fresh on, you can shower everyday and re-work the order over and over again until you are the kind of fresh you want. You can get dirty each day and shower off each night.
Goal for the day: Keep going. And take a shower.
