The Dirty Window

Most mornings I like to go outside and look at the sky after getting out of bed. If it’s raining, I stand under the roof of my deck and look out at the garden, the trees, the colours of the clouds.

If there’s sunshine, I bask in the warmth of it on my skin, the light against my eyelids, allowing it to awaken my body slowly.

After a few days that have hinted at Summer, this morning’s cloudy sky felt cold. But inside, the house was still warm, so I sat having my coffee at my lounge room window instead of going outside.

I’m blessed to have a relatively large window in my lounge room. It reaches from the ceiling to just below the back of the couch. It’s wide, stretching most of the length of the room… and it’s dirty.

In a busy household of many people, washing windows becomes a low priority. So all the windows in our home have a solid film of dust and dirt, cobwebs in the corners, and dead bugs in the grooves. But they are still clean enough to allow a filtered viewing point to the outside world and sunlight to enter the room.

This morning’s sky was pale grey as the sun gently crept above the roofline of the house next door. Wisps of white cloud created a mottled appearance against the darker backdrop, and a pale lemon glow wrapped the horizon like a hand-knitted baby’s matinee jacket.

The view from my lounge room isn’t what I would classify as spectacular. There are a few metres - slightly more than the width of a driveway - between the house and the sage green colourbond fence, and this space is mostly filled by a caravan and an old outboard motor boat my teenage son bought to go fishing. A narrow strip of garden separates these from the deck, and beyond the fence, the neighbour’s white tin roof looms like a giant reflective screen, bouncing the light glaringly into our otherwise dimly lit home.

I acknowledge there are far worse views, and I’m consistently grateful for this strip of green and patch of sky I’m able to see from inside my lounge room.

This morning, as my attention was drawn to the dirty window, it dawned on me that so often in our lives we find ourselves in situations or circumstances that feel somewhat liminal. Better than what could be, and yet less than ideal. Grateful for what is, yet yearning for more. Or wishing, at least, for things to be different in some way.

At times our focus rests on the dirty window, unable to see anything beautiful that might lay beyond it - even if we have seen and appreciated that beauty many times before.

Anaïs Nin says, “We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.” 

We view the world from inside our own lounge rooms all the time. From behind the filters of our own dirty windows. Caked with the residue of a lifetime’s worth of dust and debris. Accumulated as remnants of experiences lived, relationships tended, and the heartache of letting go.

As the sun rose over the ridge of the striped metal roof, illuminating the layers of dirt on my window, I wondered… perhaps the first step in changing the view is to clean the window?

Maybe the first step is simply... to clean the window