The Uncluttered Corner
9/30/05
by Diane Sprague
Messiness has a way of taking over. After vacuuming the rug, the pleasure of looking at the orderly smoothness I created ends quickly when the dog comes in to release about five hundred dog hairs. He is followed by my children who are blissfully munching on cookies and dropping crumbs with each bite. After that the cat comes in to cough up something unmentionable. Then the neighborhood kids deposit leaves, mud, and small twigs that got caught on their clothes and stuck tight until they found a clean rug to fall upon. I have learned to close my eyes and ignore the blatant message that my attempt to create order and cleanliness is utterly futile. One must run the vacuum periodically, but that it will create a lasting sense that everything is as it should be is a hopeless illusion.
Still I do like when things are neat and in their correct place. It used to be easier when it was just me, but over time, it gets vastly more complicated to maintain any sense of that order. Shoes are a good example of what happens over time. It used to be just my shoes. I have small feet and the philosophy that one really just a needs a few pair of comfortable shoes to be happy. They fit neatly into my closet and life made perfect sense. Then I had children, and it was really no problem at all when they were little. Their shoes were tiny and fit neatly into a small corner. The shoes were so cute, I wanted them to last for ever, but the kids kept growing out of them and I kept having to buy more. As the children grew up, the tiny shoes turned into giant clodhoppers and their numbers started multiplying. Soon the shoes stopped fitting into the small corners and the large corners stopped working too. They started showing up in odd places and they stopped showing up in pairs, especially on those rushed school mornings when it is five minutes past time to go and my barefoot kids would get teased by one lonely shoe sitting there alone in the middle of the room. They never liked my advise to just hop on one foot all day.
I was so proud of myself when I bought special shoe shelves. I thought my great intellect would master this ever growing disorganization of shoes cluttering up every room in the house, but I did not realize how big of a monster it was that I was trying to control. Even with special shelves, shoes showed up everywhere else. Neighborhood children decided to add to the mess by leaving their shoes around too. The shoes were everywhere. And in the wintertime, ugly boots were added to the chaos. Walking from one room to the other was always a hazardous adventure and those empty shoe shelves seemed to spit the shoes back into the middle of the living room within minutes after my feeble attempt to get thing under control.
So what is one who loves order and peace to do with such madness? Over time one of life's biggest lessons is that we need to let go. Disorder and chaos never go away. They follow every attempt we make to clean and organize. It is like a back and forth dance, and the dance starts to make sense when we let go of the notion that we are actually getting anywhere.
But even if we can learn to let go a little bit, it is still nice to have some corner where the dance has stopped and we can enjoy a sense of order, control, and beauty. I have a small, uncluttered corner like that. It's on my computer in my music folder. The organization of my treasure of Clay Aiken's music is impeccable. The folder is organized into subfolders, each labeled clearly. I have each download renamed so I know exactly what song it was and where it came from. I also have a section where downloads first go where I can view them and make the painful decision of which ones I will permanently save and which ones go into the recycle bin. I have accepted the fact that hard drives has finite space, so I only keep a few versions of each song. I also realize how fragile hard drives and operating systems are so I keep the songs backed up on an external drive. No cookie crumbs, shoes, or dog hairs can touch my neat little world.
My favorite song from Clay's last tour is Sailing. He sings it with such a gentle elegance that every time I hear it I am out there on the water, peacefully gliding in a world where messiness has disappeared for awhile. It is a calm, safe, happy place where time stands still and beauty surrounds me. All the other corners of my life are filled with the uncontrollable chaos of the world, but this one corner is where I can hide for awhile and hold onto something that makes sense.
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