Subscribe in a readerChaos
Since my father died a year ago, I have become messier than ever before. The disorder I create around me reflects my inability to place everything where it belongs. Looking at the piles of papers, books, and clothes strewn around my desk, I realize that, for the moment, I know how to start things but not how to finish them. I could analyze this tendency, analyze myself, and conclude that I am shying away from endings. Maybe it is that simple.
I don’t really want to turn the page. Dropping items wherever I am lets me avoid finality of any kind.
But it’s also a nuisance. When I was very young, I looked around my bedroom one day and decided that I didn’t want to live in the middle of a mess. From that point until I married twenty-two years later, I carefully put everything away: clothes, papers, pens, books. I’ve lost that habit, lost it long before I lost my father. It’s just that I am more likely to look around at the mess I’ve made now and think, “I will never be able to clean this up.”
At the same time, there does come a point at which you say to yourself, “Enough.” There are other people who are bearing up under much more tormenting circumstances. Who am I really to let everything go?
My wife always tells me that the way you clean up a mess is to pick up one thing at a time. I have always known she was right about that. The trick is to go ahead and start.
I have always found that when my mind is working overtime, feeling chaotic or at unrest, my office, apartment, or house tends to be messy and unorganized. When mind is at rest, calm and quiet, I am always able to stay organized or clean up whatever mess I have been sustaining.
So, I now look around me to to see what is going on internally. I try to adjust the internal so that everything around comes back into order. Sometimes that is a struggle, but I’ve found that I almost never am able to clean and organize if my mind is scattered.
Not sure if that helps at all, but I can relate to what you are going through.
Comment by Michael — June 10, 2008 @ 11:55 pm
I am the same way with paper. If you walk into my office (my home office not my therapy office) you will find my stacks and piles and I started it a similar way. After years of orderliness, I became a person who can’t seem to get the paper to land in the right drawer, the right file.
“…one thing at a time.” It’s a really good place to start.
Comment by Flo — June 11, 2008 @ 10:19 pm