They say that writers have the cleanest houses. It’s the idea that writers will do anything but write. They would rather buzz around in displacement activity, doing all kinds of peripheral jobs, rather than get down to the business of what they should be doing. They will clean the house again and again whether it needs it or not rather than get to work.

Okay, I'm sure there are many who write freely and easily with little effort while living in a cesspit. But those who don't, those who invent avoidance, in them I’m guessing there might be a reluctance to be still, to concentrate, to set up that inner commune, work out what they want to say, and then go about saying it. There’s a certain tranquility, a shutting out of the world that might be required to make that happen and that’s not always an easy scene to set.

I give this example to draw attention to the wider point that everyone 'cleans' too much. Rather than do what should be done, what would aid spiritual advancement, most would rather participate in frenetic tasks, those kind of hyper-stimulated practices that so characterise modern life. Somehow it is easier to get caught up in all those. It’s easier to blame some external authority for making the demand: job, family, time, money and the rest. I think it’s probably a way of shirking responsibility for the nourishment of soul, shirking it because it’s hard.

Yet I imagine there’s an internal sensor that tells when lives are out of balance spiritually. Somewhere inside it is known whatever is necessary to keep that balance in check. It’s important but it’s a tough job, probably harder than the displacement. Also in the contemporary world such a process is not really identified in any concrete way. Given today’s materialism and consumerism, things are very outwardly oriented. The inner life of feeling, spirituality and psychological wholeness is not something the zeitgeist is very adept at encouraging. Many wouldn’t even understand the concept.

That the culture doesn’t uphold the values of the inner processes I think is seriously to our detriment, as individuals, as a society, as a species even. There is no question that outward skills and abilities are way in advance of inner development. Instead of another spring cleaning it’s the inner house I say that needs attention.