Wednesday, February 22, 2012

The beauty of non existence

An amazing benefit of being a cleaner is the opportunity to observe the world without being seen.

Living in a society where you are defined by what you do, cleaners are usually not only untouchable at times but actually invisible.

This gives us the rare opportunity to observe the world as it is, not as it appears to be. We do not see what the rest of the world sees, we see reality because to many people, we are non existent and they do not have to impress us.

At Zenith Cleaners, we have the honor of having some of the most enlightened clients anyone could wish for.

We have clients who have served on the same board with their cleaners!

We also have the honor of serving clients who tend to treat us like trash while the rest of the world sees them as progressive and enlightened. It makes us conclude that the reason they do so is that they do not see us.

This makes us appreciate the more those clients who dine at the same table with their cleaners.

A number of us who clean at Zenith Cleaners are not traditional cleaners but people who lead in other domains and do cleaning as practice.

Our cleaners have had the privilege of cleaning the homes of people who would eventually submit contract bids to organizations run by their cleaner and neither party expected nor planned it.

We have had cleaners who cleaned for clients they consulted for or organizations they helped run in the past, unplanned. They did it not for economic reasons but because they wanted to see the world through a different lens.

It is hard to come away from such experiences and not be forever changed. We experience the joy of being seen and heard. But the pain of not being seen, not being heard and therefore being trampled upon, makes us go away from this practice determined to see and to hear.

Everyone deserves to be seen, everyone deserves to be heard.

Needless to say, these experiences enrich us much more than we can say and we invite others to participate too, to experience the beauty of non-existence.

1 comments:

Juniee said...

and your quote on the home page to me echoes well

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.'"

Martin Luther King (Jr)

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