There’s a great article in the NY Times about the anti-anticlutter movement that seems to be swelling in America. Perhaps there is something to be said for the creativity that a messy desk denotes. On the TV sitcom “Friends,” uberorganized Monica is much less interesting than the whirling dervish Phoebe.
Over the years, Randy I have slowly become more organized just from the sheer volume of stuff we’ve purged. The tricky part is that stuff keeps coming in (e.g., the trunk load of Christmas gifts we just brought back from West Virginia) and practicing a “one-in, one-out” rule is much easier said than done. If we didn’t have such easy access to a dumpster, I don’t know what we’d do. Case in point: last night I went through my baskets of magazines and catalogs and although it hasn’t been long since I purged them, I still had four bags to toss last night.
For us, there’s always at least one area (a desk if we’re doing well and a room/garage if we’re not) of disarray in our house. I think that’s reasonable. I like being able to put my hand on things that we need quickly, but I don’t want to be the paranoid friend who freaks out when someone uses a magazine as a coaster for a sweaty beverage glass.
As I put away our Christmas stuff, I plan to go through the bins of the stuff that never got used this year and see if I really love it or will ever use it. I resisted the after-Christmas sales this year as I realized there was little more Christmas stuff I actually wanted, let alone needed, so there was little point in looking for bargains.
Although I strive to be organized, perhaps I am waging my own mini anti-anticlutter movement though as I’m better able to live with fact that my desk top will never really be pile-free and there will always be an issue of a magazine that I haven’t read all the way through. Maybe controlled chaos is the way to go. Actually, I think that’s sort of how it’s been all along.
“One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.” -A.A. Milne