It is a familiar ritual at this time of year, inspired by nature’s obvious cues: The need for Spring Cleaning. The budding flowers and greening trees of the outdoors evoke a desire to revitalize what is inside. We clean out garages and closets, defrost refrigerators, replant gardens and even delve into some cyber-hygiene of our hard and software. But with such wholesale rehabilitation of our physical spaces, our internal inventories of attitudes and behavior and the effort toward personal refinement they should inspire, often get short shrift.

It is far easier to sweep out a dusty carport...