Sorted

Picked up my camera to go take a walk outside but was halted by the door when my eye landed on this book Scott had brought home. So aptly titled, don't you think? Oh to be "sorted" completely, once and for all. 

A little self disclosure here: If I were a dog I would be an Australian Shepherd. I would thrive on herding everything that moves into tidy little groups. As a person created with the O gene (organization gene), I naturally love to herd objects into tidy little bins and places. Marbles in jars, flashlights in one drawer, shoes in a basket by the door, etc. I deplore visual clutter for the anxiety it creates in me, and find myself organizing a drawer just for the fun of it. Those of us with this gene spend our lives battling the law of entropy. We are at constant war and we enlist our children and husbands even though they may not give a rip about participating in it. Some of us even go on to make money selling our skills and helping others who lack this genetic disposition, who find comfort in clutter. (Horrors!) We impose our formulas for "sorted" living with our color coded file folders and color coded bins and our strategies for keeping the clutter at the threshold. We have assumed that the messes, whether physical or emotional, can be fixed with a simple method of sorting. We know that those who lack this gene will buy our books and watch our shows because we know they believe that we have the answers. Right?

Please, I am not bashing organization. I will never tire of organizing a junk drawer. And I do believe that our external worlds often mirror our internal--cues to what is really going on underneath it all.  Order can be good too, healthy for our bodies, healthy for our children. But like anything good in our lives we have this human way of perverting it to the extreme (think OCD) until it becomes the drug and we find ourselves addicted to the fix it brings. A temporary fix...

I know this because over the years I have experienced a slow revealing of this lie: the notion that if you organize the mess you will feel "sorted". I realized I poured over Pottery Barn magazines not for their beautiful furniture but for the pristine life they conveyed. Not an ounce of clutter! (Where did they hide all the McDonald Happy Meal toys or the esoteric crap their kids accumulated? If only I could live inside a PB catalogue!) But my thoughts revealed what I had fallen for when I found myself saying, "If my house was completely clean and clutter free, then I could cope, all would be good." I realized that my organizing had become the substitution for dealing with the underlying root of my anxiety: that my life was not perfect, that I was not completely in control. Perfection and Control--the eternal quest. (If I could just order my outer world then my inner one would feel a whole lot better.)  What a battle! When my anxiety flared up, my need for clean ramped up to meet the ante. As I have been dealing with the personal issues,  I have found that I can coexist with the moments of clutter with ever increasing degrees of ease. 

There's a reason my hubby found this book in the bargain section of the book store: the fix wasn't enough, a better book came along, the methods were too hard to keep up with.  But just because I have grown does not mean that I am not tempted to give in and crack it open. Hey, I've got the O gene. But I know better now.