MESSY STUFF

Beginning to feel normalish after too much travel...China...Palm Springs (CA). The thoughts and observations have been overwhelming me, my mind is a mess.

So today I picked up a book, A Perfect Mess, lurking among the piles of tomes to read. I am indeed a compulsive Amazon one-clicker with a wish-list, but there are also a couple of book clubs I "belong" to and I like to send off the order in the mail and then forget about it. Then maybe six weeks later, these books I don't remember ordering arrive like little surprise presents to myself. Very disorderly. Three of these recent arrivals have to do with the concept of getting organized...one is about planning and features lots of acronyms and mnemonics and bullet points, one is about shedding (what was I thinking, ordering more books?) and tackles the emotions one has about those old really nice clothes you have in the closet that don't fit. But the best one, A Perfect Mess, is about "why bother?" There is a whole INDUSTRY of people helping other people clear their closets, manage their space (to say nothing of their time) and making money off the tremendous ambivalence that modern Americans have about materialism. Why? Turns out order can be counter-productive and the time you spend creating it may be a waste. And really, who cares. In my case, I don't entertain, I know where everything is (or what it is under) and I know there is no closet inspector.

Once when I was a little messy girl and sloppily stashed and crammed everything in my closet, my mother in exasperation persuaded a nice man from our church to pose as the closet inspector. We actually had closet inspections. Consequently, I now keep pretty orderly closets and drawers, but the open space is a problem. I need more. It is true what Stephen Wright said:" You can't have everything...where would you put it?" But again, who cares?

These thoughts come to me at a strange time, after having recently traveled with a Buddhist monk to a Taoist place, where material stuff was not an issue. The monk had NOTHING except a bag of robes and some malas. (But it should be pointed out that his existence depended on the benevolence and largesse of people who would provide him food and shelter just because he was a monk.) He was not burdened with stuff -- I thought I had packed lightly, but he shamed me.

The authors of A Perfect Mess point out that it is in our mess and display of accumulated stuff that our personalities can be detected. It would make sense that the monk would have no stuff: he also has no ego (or at least he's trying to clean that out of his being).

I think my mess and my ego are going to be with me for a long time.