Paging through a magazine in a waiting room I stumbled upon an article... "Conquering Clutter", by David Dudley.
Clutter... it seems an endless battle, one I'm genetically programmed to lose. My father is a saver, a hoarder, a stasher, a stockpiler and a packrat. His basement and garage are jam packed to the rafters with boxes and heaps and stacks of STUFF... old stuff, parts of stuff, new unused stuff, you name it. But when something breaks, when something gets lost, he's always able to produce a replacement.
As a little girl I loved to sneak down to his workshop where I'd look, but not touch. He'd taken baby food jars, screwed the lids into the beams and filled each jar with screws, nuts, bolts and itty bitty gizmos of all kinds. At a glance he could look up and see what he needed through the bottom of the glass jar. He had things hanging and stacked everywhere, all very neat, all tools spotless and gleaming, but all so crowded.
(I loved the workshop area, dreamed of one day making things of my own there. Alas, I was a girl and never allowed. The closest I got to a power tool was to use a sewing machine or vacuum cleaner!)
Over the years, Dad's pack-ratting has taken over his house. I look at my house and all the things everywhere and wonder if it's my destiny too. He's 86, I'm 52 ... what will the next 34 years bring?
David Dudley writes... "The rarely used objects cluttering our lives are not really objects at all, but symbols of our plans and untapped potential. They are, as my father said while I hauled off a grill, 'artifacts of an unused life'."
Are all these things that create my clutter "artifacts of an unused life"? I beg to differ... I USE my clutter! In my office (where I type this) on the desk tops are chargers for camera and phone, calculators, rolodex and a pile of files, active and pending. A stack of coins (because Steve always empties his pockets where he knows I'll find it and keep it!), a wad of Kleenex, two date books, one 2006 and one 2007, docking station for laptop, lamps, extra speakers with woofer for improved sound on this computer, other computer equipment, pictures of my kids, and three bags of fabric samples. And this is the tidy version!
My clutter seems to fall into a few categories.* Things I'm working on.
* Things of beauty that I enjoy seeing around me.
* Things that are just part of daily life.
Dudley points out that Dante wrote about the "hoarders" and the "wasters", in his classic "Inferno". Both vices were doomed on one level of hell to battle it out. Perhaps it's the extreme, either way, that becomes our undoing.
I have too many projects, too much on my plate at any given time. I'm never bored! But I'm sometimes overwhelmed. If I'm not creating, everything in me feels out of balance. My mind needs to be always wrapped around something or someone. And so I surround myself with always a bit more than I can handle.
What if I were to complete EVERYTHING and be left with...:::gasp:::... NOTHING to do? Ha ha ha, as if that could ever happen. But deep in my psyche, I wonder if that's part of my madness. I do complete things... but always I have several books being read at once, several projects, several agendas. Why?
I'm doomed to this cycle of creating and destroying, as I create, something else (a tidy existence) is being destroyed.
Which brings me to the Designer of our universe... mathematicians, theologians and physicists debate two opposing theories, chaos vs. creation. I say that our world is the misbegotten love child of these two forces. Perhaps opposites do attract.
And perhaps I am made in the image of my Maker.
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