The Thought Architecture of Mopping a Floor

Most people’s thoughts are like collections of different paintings. There’s a completed image for each activity they fill their time with. Or there’s a set of values they’re supposed to hold in any common social situation. The right picture comes up on the screen of the mind at the right moments, and they adjust their attitude and behavior according to it.

Each picture is like a filter. They instantly know what to think and feel, so long as they’ve been exposed to a situation they interpret as similar enough before and had time for the picture to form. Every time thereafter, they reference back to that image to determine what to do.

It’s a simple way to operate. No thoughts are ever wasted. Consciousness is minimized so that the unconscious can largely take over.

But the system has obvious limits. The images are fixed. It’s difficult or impossible to iterate upon them or to reconsider how they might better look.

They also can’t be generalized very easily. The fixed thinker has a hard time applying the filter of one image to some new setting where similar principles might be in play. They think only of fixed conclusions, not evolving processes.

It never works that way for me. My thoughts, however simple or complex, however commonplace or exceptional, always require elaborate but consistent pathways to form.

Perhaps a better way to describe it would be as a map. There’s always an invisible starting place. There are always many intermediary steps between where the thought originates and where it will eventually terminate in some conclusion that leads to an attitude and/or action.

On the occasions when a terminal thought or conclusion seems to show up on its own, disconnected from the rest of the established architecture, it tends to evaporate from my mind unless I can find a way to connect it to the existing branching pathways.

Memories fade quickly unless there is some mythological significance to them. My mind needs a meaningful category to place them in to give them narrative meaning, or else they go in the junk drawer to be ignored. They are just more stuff happening without a cause or even a reason to consider them for more than a passing moment of direct observation.

The map makes some experience stick, though. It adds lasting significance to the incidental. It makes the invisible principles stand out more than the visible event itself. I see the things that other people ignore.

Often, I’m faced with what I know is a logistically simple task. But I haven’t had the experience I need to build the necessary cognitive architecture to tie it into everything else I know inside and out.

The first time I see something new, I don’t know anything, consciously, about what it is or how it works. If it seems similar enough to things I am used to seeing or interacting with, my mind might just automatically categorize it as an offshoot of something familiar. But I have to have the mechanics explained to me first or meticulously figured out through personal experimentation.

Consider the common mop. Until last week, I lived my entire 34-year life not knowing how to mop a floor. And it seemed that no one could explain it to me, even fervent and frequent moppers. I had to put the internal infrastructure in place for the process to make sense to me.

The mop map thought architecture goes something like this.

What on earth is a mop? A mop is… something that cleans. A tool people use to clean floors. But it’s not the same as the other tools they use to clean, such as a broom or a sponge. Well, it shares some similarities with both of those things.

Would it be fair to say that a mop is like a broom with a sponge on its end? Is that an adequate description?

What do you use a broom for? To sweep the floor, of course.

Sweeping. That’s an interesting type of action to take.

Can we generalize that? Is there any other context in which we sweep things?

Maybe a SWAT team does a “sweep” of a building they are searching. But that’s a metaphorical sweep. It’s not remotely the same action as what we are supposed to do with a broom.

What do we do when we are sweeping the floor? Are we rubbing it? No, not quite. We are collecting dirt into piles through repetitive pushing and pulling motions. Yes. That seems like a more adequate description.

But that’s not quite the same thing as what we do with a sponge or a mop. To some degree, we are certainly gathering dirt and other detritus into piles for easy collection and removal with those cleaning tools too.

But there’s a critical addition here: the use of water. And also, probably some kind of soap.

What kind of soap? There are so many to choose from.

A floor-cleaning liquid is really just a specialized kind of soap, isn’t it? But in what way is it optimized for the use of cleaning floors, specifically? Why not any other flat surface that needs cleaning? Is there something special about floors that I am unaware of? I’m not a floor engineer. I shouldn’t be expected to know this.

Does it have something to do with the materials that floors are commonly made of?

Or is the fact that the primary activity humans perform on a floor is walking with their feet?

Is it that floors attract more dirt and detritus because they are at the bottom of a room, so (all other things being equal) the force of gravity pulls and keeps more stuff on them than any other higher surface?

I assume that even if I don’t have a specialty floor cleaner, any old generic soap will do. Perhaps the soap I use to wash my hands or my dishes.

Incidentally, I know not to use the soap I use to wash my dishes to wash my hands because it feels different. It’s too… viscose. Too strong for flesh.

Anyway, where was I?

Oh yes. A mop.

It’s like a broom with a big sponge on the end. We use it to collect dirt and detritus into little piles for easy removal. But the addition of water and soap serves another function by loosening the dirt and other forms of grime that have adhered to the solid surface of the floor.

How did they do that, anyway? I don’t have the relevant chemical knowledge to come up with an obvious answer right now. Certain kinds of dirt adhere more easily. The presence of moisture seems to aid the process too.

So now we have a natural hierarchy of types of detritus to remove from the floor: (1) those that can be removed by sweeping with a broom because they have not adhered to the floor and (2) those that can only be removed by a mop with soapy water that somehow nullifies the adherence.

Let’s assume that we have already swept the floor, thereby removing the non-adhered detritus. Now it’s time to mop.

We need to collect the water in a place where it can be mixed with the correct proportion of soap to achieve the desired level of un-adhering qualities to be applied to the adhered detritus. There’s probably no perfect method for determining that. A few drops of soap in a medium-sized bucket of water. Maybe a small cupful.

Did the soap come with a measuring cup in the lid or something like that that would indicate the manufacturer’s informed opinion on the matter? And did the manufacturers know how much water I’d be mixing it with? Is there a recipe printed on the soap packaging?

Usually, I know that water is soapy when I can see white bubbles frothing at its surface. Let’s go with that as our standard of soapiness.

When we submerge our mop in the soapy water, we transfer some of it to the mop’s spongy head. Now we will move the mop along the surface of the floor with our wet and spongy soapy head, causing the adhered detritus to transfer from the floor to the mop.

Oh. But now we have a new problem – a wet and dirty mop head.

There’s a natural limit to the amount of detritus any mop head can hold, and it will probably be considerably less than the amount held by the average unmopped floor. This means we’ll have to employ another periodic step in our approach. We have to somehow remove the dirt and detritus from the mop to a place we don’t mind it being put, or else the mop will cease to remove it from the floor.

Can I dispose of the fouled water outside the window or the door? How can I most easily remove it? Oh, I see the mop designers have already implemented a fairly clever solution to this problem. I can rapidly expel the soiled water from the head of the mop by spinning it in a wheel built into the mop bucket.

So I guess all I need to do is repeat this process until all the adhered dirt has been removed from the floor of the room. Then I scale up the process to include all the other rooms too.

Simple. Why didn’t anyone just tell me that years ago?

They all just kept telling me to mop the floor without any elaboration on the process of mopping – like it was some prenatal concept I was supposed to have just been born with because… well… you know… that’s a thing that people do. Like all those other things they do. And every time they do those things they do, they just know what to do. The picture is fully formed and accessible without backtracking or analysis.

It must be such a quiet life within. Peaceful. Maybe that’s why they seek chaos and disruption as a form of recreation, when to someone like me it only harms the architecture.