SWINGING ON A STAR
The way I did it.
I improved my surroundings.
This experiment was a reader’s suggestion from Carol. She suggested taking fifteen minutes a day to improve your surroundings. She went on to say that she had used her fifteen minutes for cleaning, organizing, and purging.
This suggestion came in weeks ago. My first reaction was to doubt that a mere fifteen minutes could make much of an impact on my surroundings. I’ve told you how overwhelmed with projects I’ve been and that I’m struggling to just keep up with the basics of laundry, dusting, and feeding myself something other than takeout.
Almost as if on cue, the song “Swinging on a Star” began to play. It’s a great song, with music by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Johnny Burke. Crooner Bing Crosby made it famous, and it won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1944.
The musical moral tale asks if you would like to swing on a star and carry moonbeams home in a jar—meaning that you use your imagination and curiosity—and be better off than you are … or would you rather be … a mule … a pig … a fish—and be stubborn … messy … and foolish.
The lyrics were so familiar, but I’m not sure when or where I would have heard them or sung them. Obviously, I wasn’t around in the 1940s. Perhaps at primary school? Anyway, my hesitancy to try the experiment was certainly stubborn and mulish. The fact that I was so overwhelmed and had so many possible improvements to my surroundings, was piglike messy. So then, was I being foolish like a fish—forever swimming with blinders on?
The answer to that question was … yes! … which suggests I was also potentially going to yield to the song’s moral tale—our choices shape who we become.
Since I didn’t want to be a mule, a pig, or a fish, I took the challenge.
My first fifteen minutes were spent on a drawer full of junk. I’d rather not admit to the tale of this drawer, but I should give you the full picture. When we had our kitchen cabinets replaced, I saved the old drawer full of miscellaneous “stuff” for when I had time to sort through it. That was six months ago. I found about ten thousand paper clips, a clump of rubber bands that had lost their elastic and fused together, and fistfuls of dried-up markers and pens. I did salvage the remote control to our garage door opener, a viewfinder keychain with an image of our daughter on the soccer field, and three AAA-size batteries. Not quite a pirate’s bounty, but definitely worth the fifteen minutes.
The next day, my fifteen minutes were spent on the box from the bathroom cabinet. Again, it was a box that had been patiently waiting for six months. When we replaced the kitchen cabinets, we replaced the bathroom one, too … because, why not? The contents of the old bathroom cabinet were poured into said box. Inside, I found twenty-five mini bottles of shampoos, conditioners, potions, and lotions, all well past their expiration date, and most of them half used. I also found a few gadgets—a prickly face roller, a smooth jade stone, and packages of Crest white strips, all of which had promised to make me look younger. I’d saved them for “just in case.” Just in case I traveled somewhere, or just in case I found the time to torture my teeth with bleach and torment my face with tiny needles. None of those cases occurred. All of it went into the trash.
So this week, instead of settling into the comfortable mud of “this is just how things are now,” I’m choosing to swing at something small but shiny. Not because I have to. Not because it’s practical. But because even at this age, we still get to decide what kind of creature we’re becoming. Thank you, Carol.
The way I did it. Swinging on a star.
This is part of what I’m calling Expeditionvision—trying things on purpose and paying attention to what happens. I’m not offering advice or giving instructions. I’m just sharing the way I did it. If there’s something that you’ve been wanting to do—but haven’t—I’d love to hear about it. I’m open to reader suggestions for future experiments.
Field Notes: For Paid Subscribers
Paid subscribers, I’ve added a short field notes section below with what surprised me the most, and what I would do differently the next time.