The Tidying thing. It’s now become one of those irritating elephants in the room that simply won’t go away, and it has started trumpeting as well!
The basic trouble is that there are ALWAYS better things to do than tidying. As long as the chaos is relatively clean and there is no rodent community inhabiting the mess then the motivation to start ordering the disordered is limited.
I once compared the actual working space on my commodious desk to the size of a dinner plate. Sometimes that image is inaccurate and the comparison is more with a side plate than anything else. At one point I was making a note and needed to consult something in the dictionary (vowels always trip me up and getting them the wrong way round always looks so childish) and I found myself pushing my chair away from the desk to allow me to balance the dictionary (it is large!) by cantilevering it over the edge of said desk.
It is clearly absurd that I appear to be working towards emulating some sort of nineteenth-century mezzotint caricature of a scholar working in a cramped attic. It is true that on the third floor, the room in which I work has been carved out of the roof, so there is indeed a sloped ceiling over my head, and I have to be very careful about how I stand up otherwise I could slump back unconscious into my chair having knocked myself out by too precipitate an ascent!
The untidiness by which I am surrounded is almost comic in its chaos – though I sometimes do detect a sort of narrative thread linking the different piles of detritus (which isn’t, it is all essential ‘stuff’) and the ancillary scraps of my life scattered about as a type of surface layer, or erratics (if I may be allowed to use a metaphor from geology) to give an air of mystery and suggest hidden depths and an underlying order to what is quite clearly The Mayhem of Objects.
There are two reasons for writing this. The first, and the most obvious is that writing about something like tidying is a way of ensuring that it does not get done, because you have already ‘done’ something by the mere act of writing about it. And the subject of the writing would disappear if careless ordering were to destroy its unstructured, yet intentional randomness. Even I think that the previous sentence is mere verbiage, no matter how seriously I might take it as a form of self-defence for indolence!
The second reason for writing this is that the writing may act as a stimulus to do something about a situation that irritates me every time I have to thread my way through the maze of incommodiousness before I can get to my scrap of working space at my desk.
I know that I often write notes to myself, usually during my post-gym/pool cup of tea, and I even draw in little tick boxes as a further incentive to get things done. I am proud to relate that I am made of sterner stuff than can be cajoled into acquiescence by four small lines, and the empty space thus enclosed often goes unticked. But . . .
There does come a time when the joke has gone far enough, when the situation is untenable when Something Has To Be Done.
This situation has, I think, been reached. I find myself juggling a notebook, a sheet of paper, and a couple of books (a conglomeration that should be easily accommodated on a reasonably sized desk) with increasing desperation. And once I (almost) said to myself, “I simply cannot work like this!”
I may not have voiced it, but I have certainly meant it. Though meaning something without doing it negates the whole imperative.
I will have to look on this writing as both an appeal for help, and also a decision to act. If the situation is untenable then it must not be allowed to continue. Action must follow.
Look on this as Part I of the Great Clean Up & Out. It will be interesting to see if there will be further instalments. I can assure you, my reader, that I am as interested in the outcome as you are indifferent!
Time will tell.
