“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”

—— Pablo Picasso

Often when you are ill, you are confined to a space – a bed, a home, a street, a neighbourhood. Your ability to wander and travel are curbed. This can be difficult when you belong to a generation of people who are used to flying to far off lands at short notice. However, many of us have also experienced this confinement as a result of the COVID pandemic. We know what it feels like to be confined and for our mobility to be curbed. Through both working from home and being unwell, I started to notice my environment at home more. One of the key things I realised was affecting my health and happiness was…dust.

I hadn’t ever really thought about dust much before except for maybe dusting visible surfaces when I noticed them looking lacklustre. I also sometimes felt guilty when our pooja stand at home was dusty and dusted this with reverence. Recently, due to mine and my husbands busy jobs, we had enlisted the help of a cleaner to help us clean our home every 2 weeks. However, this often didn’t involve cleaning under or behind furniture. When I started doing a lot of yoga on the floor, I noticed just how much dust had built up under these large pieces of furniture, particularly in the living room and bedroom, the spaces we use the most. 

When I would do yoga, I would be totally present in each moment and really take in my environment and surroundings. I started noticing the smell of the dust in our bedroom- old, fusty, dead. I could sometimes feel it entering my nose and I wondered what happened to it inside of my body. One day, soon after I became aware of this sensation, I took one of my son’s baby wipes and our vacuum cleaner and fervently wiped under the big dresser and behind the bed and vacuumed under the bed. I thought of my son, often sleeping in our room, exposed to all of this material and it entering his lungs. Seeing it build on the wipes and in the vacuum chamber made me feel so relieved and happy to be getting rid of this material that just felt so…wrong in an indoor environment, especially one that we slept in. 

I decided to look a bit more closely at what household dust is made of. Why did it feel so wrong to be inhaling it? I found out that dust is made of dead skin cells, hair, microscopic dustmites, pollen and any chemicals/microbes present in the home or wider environment e.g. PFAS, lead, mold etc. I kind of knew this already but it was still very off-putting. I also found out that children (and adults, but to a lesser extent) are exposed to dust via inhalation, dermal absorption and ingestion. My family was literally eating dust! The health effects of dust include eye irritation, coughing, sneezing, allergies and hay fever and asthma attacks. For people with other respiratory conditions, it can worsen symptoms of these. 

I thought about what the dust in my old Edwardian house could be made of. Generally we have tried to avoid chemicals in our household but we do use cleaning products, have some furniture which I’m sure has flame retardants on it and most concerningly, we live within a 5 mile radius of a huge building site where there are innumerable flats going up. Hmmmm. There’s not much I can do about that. 

So what do I do? I dust and vacuum more often, and especially under the big furniture! Simple as that. I use a wet microfibre cloth, or rarely I use my son’s baby wipes! Seeing that clean floor and the difference between the dust and non-dusted area gives me an immense sense of satisfaction, knowing I have protected my family from inhaling, absorbing or ingesting the dust. I also ensure that if we have household building work taking place, appropriate PPE is used and where possible the dust producing work happens in the garden. Although we don’t use it too often, we also have an air purifier which we bought when we lived near a busy road. If we smell anything odd in the air, the purifier goes on for a few hours and it makes a huge difference. 

In this removal of dust in my home, I also feel a sense of renewal in my soul, as though I am wiping away the product of yesterday to make way for the activity of today. I feel life is moving forward rather than remaining stationary or stagnant in the past. Writing about it has also enabled me to clear all of these thoughts from my system to hopefully make room for new ones. 

Dusting can also be pretty hard work so maybe I can count it as exercise…..?