We’ve all heard the term, and it sounds catchy. Most recently, I heard someone use the term to describe their library. I understand what is meant by organized chaos, but the truth is that these two words don’t really belong in the same sentence. What we are trying to say is that it’s a mess, but it’s our mess, and we know just where to find things. The truer answer is that we organize our chaos to survive, and we learn to deal with the clutter because there are only twenty four hours in a day. We probably manage our time as well as we manage our stuff, so there is never any resolution to the clutter, only futile attempts to manage it.
I recently moved a couch in my second living room. Every time I entered this room, the clutter (aka chaos) on the couch and surrounding areas gave me anxiety. I engaged the whole family in the move, as it is a large piece of furniture. I told them all my plan to rearrange the rest of the room, and immediately I heard resistance. The three of them stood there with a “here we go again” look on their faces. They know me. And they knew that a piece of moved furniture was the beginning. They knew that the process of reorganizing our chaos was underway, and they all wanted to be any other place than home.
I left the couch in the new spot for a few weeks, until one night I walked into the space and realized that I was tired of managing chaos. I realized that moving my furniture, or my craft supplies, my laundry baskets, or anything else in the house was only going to be a temporary fix to a greater problem. So without asking for help, I moved the couch back and decided to do an internal inventory to understand why I have been stuck in this cycle of managing chaos and clutter for decades. I don’t want to find a temporary fix, I want a resolution.
In a book club that I have hosted several times, there is a question posed about you standing in your kitchen once you’ve arrived, and what that might look like. Every time this question is asked, I immediately get this image of me standing in front of the counter in a long white nightgown. There is a breeze flowing through the open window that lifts the hem of my nightgown as I gaze into a field of yellow flowers. Everything in the room is white, and the window is clean. This is comical for two reasons: 1) I don’t own a white nightgown; 2) The view from my kitchen window has never been yellow flowers. It has taken me a long time to understand that this vision represents several pleas from my subconscious.
First, if I am in the kitchen in my nightgown, I am not rushed. For me, most mornings begin with sleep-shame, so I wake up feeling like I am already behind schedule, no matter what time it is. For some reason, I wasn’t born with an internal clock that shuts down when the sun goes down, and I have always viewed sleep as an inconvenience rather than a necessity. The second thing that stands out to me is white. Everything is white, and having seen enough Clorox commercials growing up, I know that white means clean. Clean is important to me. I didn’t grow up in clean homes. Actually, I didn’t grow up in homes at all, I grew up in houses – drug houses. The flowers are surely daffodils, even though I can never see the details in the flowers when I envision this moment. Daffodils represent catching things in the moment. They bloom so briefly, if you don’t make time to enjoy them, they are gone before you can.
I have spent the last couple of years getting to know myself, learning to like myself, and to reconcile my past failures so that I can live a life free from shame. So after I moved the couch back, I began to explore the reason I moved it in the first place. Having moved more than twenty times before my twentieth birthday, I guess I feel like moving things is an opportunity to start fresh. Kids in first grade picked on me, but then we moved and I had an opportunity to make new impressions. I no longer move from house to house or city to city, but I move the things inside my home in an effort to feel the opportunity to start over with the chaos.
So, how do I move away from merely managing chaos? I have to confront it. So I did. I looked my clutter square in the proverbial eye, and I said, “Enough!” I hopped up off of the couch and grabbed an empty Amazon box from the pile by the back door and eyed my living room. What could I live without? What has been there so long that it has moved from place to place, never finding a home? What was there that I really didn’t love? I picked up a sign that my lender gave me when I bought my first home with my husband. Home, Sweet Home read the sign. That didn’t feel so accurate in that moment. In the box it went. Next, a pillow with the words I love you to the moon and back stitched on it. Those words reminded me of a dear friend, and I had bought the pillow for one of my kids (terrible, I can’t even remember which one) about 5 years ago. That isn’t even my saying, and it isn’t something my kids and I say to each other. And they left it laying in the living room for weeks (okay, maybe months, don’t judge me). With a twinge of guilt, I put it in the box.
I spent about fifteen minutes tidying up the living room and placing other odds and ends in the box, five, maybe six items. Then, I set the box down next to the couch, took a seat next to it, and I admired my work. It looked tidy in there, and it felt clean. I lit a candle and reclined the chair.
That was about two weeks ago. And the box is sitting next to the couch at home, while I am on vacation, thinking about that silly box. Why didn’t I throw it away, or better yet, donate it? Why was it so easy to put the items in the box, but so hard to get rid of them? And what would my whole house look like if I grabbed an empty Amazon box and went into every room with a ruthless determination to elimate clutter from my home? The thought excites me. And it scares me. And I get this sick feeling in the top of my stomach and the back of my throat – all at the same time.
I’ve read the book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer, and suddenly I feel like I need to write the book on the ruthless elimation of clutter. As my eldest sister says, I have a rich internal life. All of this is happening in my mind while I am camping at the ocean, sitting around campfires with new friends. Before he fell asleep, I asked my husband if he thought it would be crazy if I went on a mission when we got home to eliminate one thousand items from our home. He said, “I wouldn’t think you’re crazy, but don’t touch my tools!” Then, I asked each of my children how many single possessions they thought we had in our home. One said hundreds, the other said thousands, maybe twenty five hundred. My guess is closer to 30,000. When you consider that I have close to 100 pieces in my linen closet alone, and let’s not talk about under the bathroom sink! I am sure there are tens of thousands of things scattered through our modest home.
So, if my husband doesn’t think I am crazy…I think I am going to give it a try! I might drive him crazy, along with my kids, but I believe this chaotic home has been a source of anxiety and it might be driving me crazy, so what have I got to lose – besides ONE THOUSAND THINGS?
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Uncommonly Common Mom 