Accepting a little messiness
Take my friend Katie, a reformed megaslob. “Twice,” she says, “I've actually thrown out a sink full of dishes that had been sitting for so long that they were caked in muck rather than attempt to wash them. It was simply easier for me to buy new ones.”
That's extreme, granted, but most of us end up with a few dirty pots left in the kitchen when we sit down to eat. If we stopped to wash every last one of them, the food would get cold. “You can't let mess impede your enjoyment of the meal,” Kula says. “They'll get washed — later!” As for Katie, when she moved to a new, larger apartment, she swore she'd make a fresh start. “I vowed to be tidy in all areas, not only in the kitchen. I set up an ultra organized filing system and spent days stashing every piece of paper I owned into its exact place,” she recalls. “But it was so disheartening when the mail came, with new bills and things to file. I realized I was never going to keep up.” Perfection, after all, is ephemeral, as evanescent as the moment when all of Katie's papers were neatly filed (and her dishes washed).
Katie has now found a happy medium, tossing paperwork into a few general folders and doing a more elaborate sort-and-toss a few times a year. Abrahamson points out that being able to tolerate a bit of dishevelment can make you more efficient in the long run. “By letting paper pile up for a while before you deal with it, you make one trip to the filing cabinet instead of 10.” Even Albert Einstein, great thinker that he was, advocated messiness, famously saying, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?” Perhaps that's why a 2005 survey by the nationwide recruiting firm Ajilon Office found that people who call themselves neat freaks are likely to earn less than folks who don't describe themselves that way.
This compromise between entropy and order can make life feel more meaningful, if you let it. As my friend Jessica says, “I sort of accept my messiness, but I still strive for some kind of system, and that's when I make my discoveries. When I'm weeding through the monstrosity of paper that is our dining room, I inevitably find a year's worth of my son's drawings in a bin, and it's fantastic to see his progress. Same with all the other stuff around. I love the serendipity of it, especially when I've lost something for so long that I've forgotten about it. When I do tidy up, however half-assed, it turns life into a treasure hunt.”
Beauty in disorder
You could say that Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, came to the same conclusion about mess. The man was a genius; his lab, a pigsty. In 1928, he left for vacation and abandoned some cultures in their petri dishes. When he returned, he found that mold had grown in one of them; observing the fuzzy growths, where bacteria seemed unable to flourish, led to his lifesaving breakthrough. (Abrahamson adds that years later, when Fleming was given a tour of a pristine, well-organized laboratory, a fellow scientist exclaimed, “Imagine what you could have discovered here!” Fleming wryly replied, “Not penicillin.”)
Even if you're unlikely to have a scientific aha! moment anytime soon, you may find that more disorder means more random moments of beauty. (Chaos theory actually refers to a seemingly random jumble that contains hidden order.) “If you're not always focused on finding the main path, you're more open to the world,” Dr. Holland says. With that in mind, I recently played hooky from work to chaperone my 6-year-old's class trip. If you haven't figured it out already, I have problems with procrastination — which is about holding out for perfection rather than jumping in and taking risks, even if the results are a little messy. I spend far too much time at my desk checking e-mail and looking at important cat pictures online. Then I castigate myself for being so unfocused. So on this morning, I told myself that because I wasn't accomplishing anything anyway, I might as well be with my daughter Josie, instead of at my desk.
The trip was the essence of messiness. There was no AC on the school bus, but instead of bitching, I focused on Josie's luminous skin and delicious little-girl smell. At the beach, where the children were studying tidal pools, I observed from the shore as Josie was knocked down by a wave. Instead of rushing to her, I stayed still and watched her eyes widen and her body freeze for a moment, before she bounced up laughing, coated in sand. (That night, I washed half a cup of the stuff out of her hair. Talk about mess.) After she was in bed, I stopped procrastinating for once and started writing. I had to crank to meet my deadline, but I also felt rejuvenated and newly motivated. Away from the computer, my ideas had the time to gel.
The Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi is about the beauty of imperfection, the art of appreciating the loveliness of hair that's full of sand as opposed to a perfect, sprayed, unmussed 'do. Wabi-sabi isn't about embracing dirt; it is about savoring the beauty that can be found even in a chipped bowl, recycled to hold some stones from the beach, or in the inviting softness of old leather. It's a truly environmentally friendly way to live — the opposite of our craze for consumerism — and one that's very human.
A perfectly minimalist, clutter-free house, on the other hand, may be beautiful, but it's also sterile, a little cold. You might say the same of someone who worries more about a wine ring marring her countertop than enjoying the wine. Something meaningful is getting sacrificed on the altar of tidiness. “If you feel hollow inside, a fabulous apartment won't make everything better,” Dr. Holland says. “You'll always be searching for the next level of perfection.” or you'll be guarding against the natural devolution of what you've crafted, unable to relax for a moment. “You can treat your home like a museum but still get termites,” Dr. Holland adds. You can also treasure your white flokati rug, asking every guest to take off her shoes and drink only clear beverages, as an acquaintance of mine did, but then one day, a visiting dog can manage to scarf a bowl of M&M's in a minute, and upchuck in Technicolor all over the rug (true story).
Similarly, you can exercise, eat right and go for regular checkups and still end up getting cancer, as my husband did, or scrupulously avoid soft cheeses, sushi and litter boxes and still have a miscarriage, as I did. Accepting human frailty — and occasional piles of newspaper — is a lot saner than constantly seeking perfection.
Organized all along
Clearly, mess isn't simply about stuff. Ambiguity will always be with us, and finding the right balance between order and anarchy is a work in progress. There will always be pain and uncertainty; the trick is learning to live with it. “It's possible to be happy, even if your desires are never fully satisfied,” Kula says. “Your yearnings themselves can be a huge source of self-awareness and joy.”
Unfortunately, most of us expect life to be as clean as an operating room. When something terrible (and therefore messy) happens, we want there to be a reason. She shouldn't have gone to his apartment on a first date. They shouldn't have taken that adjustable-rate mortgage. “But when we try to justify the unjustifiable, what we're doing is blaming or deflecting; we're saying, ‘That can't happen to me!’” Rabbi Kula explains. “You can't separate nature's beauty from its destructiveness.” That's terrifying but also liberating. If you admit that understanding the universe or fixing its messes isn't always possible, you can be more loving and humane, toward others and yourself.
“Mess is life, and too often we don't appreciate it until it's gone,” says my friend Judith, whose golden retriever died earlier this year. “A few days ago, I went to get my idiotic, overpriced vacuum cleaner fixed and discovered that — surprise! — dog hair had gummed up the works. The guys at the repair store were joking that I needed to get a different, less sheddy dog. Then I told them what had happened. And they hugged me! Now every time I look around my apartment and notice that the tumbleweeds of rusty hair are gone, I feel sad. In retrospect, there was joy in that mess.”
I had a revelation of my own when my husband got sick, and then recovered: I need to be a little more forgiving of my own disorganization, internal and external. Instead of beating myself up and lamenting my Post-it collection and seemingly scattershot way of working, I'm better off focusing on the things I have the power to improve and letting-the-hell-go of the rest. In the process, I've discovered that my tendency to do several things at once, all imperfectly, may not be such a liability. When I get stuck on one assignment, I can move to another; if my mind isn't worrying a problem like a dog with a bone, my subconscious tends to come up with a solution. In my way, I've been organized all along. I just couldn't see it.
