Clutter

I can’t think straight in the midst of clutter.

Actually, it’s just my space in the house, the downstairs, the busy world headquarters of Westphalia Publishing that’s usually cluttered. It’s where I go after coffee upstairs with Culley Jane, where things are more together. I like it when she scans the morning edition of the Denver Post and tells me what the headlines are that day. That’s how I get my “mainstream” news.

Looks like we might really invade Venezuela, and then maybe Cuba, too.  There were some local ICE raids. An overturned semi on I-25. Broncos win again. On an inside page, there’s a human interest story about an immigrant family with a child who had all walked through Central American jungles to get here, grateful to have found some scraps of day labor and shelter before winter hits hard, always anticipating the unannounced sound of authoritarian fists hammering at their apartment door.

Clean the table, dishes put away.

Then I go downstairs to where I work. As a reporter, I think it’s my job to try to make sense of it all, to understand the natural course of a mighty underground river, but I can’t think straight in the midst of clutter.

I’m looking for patterns, but I can’t get beyond the clutter of particular things, unorganized stacks and piles of paper to go through; manuscripts to edit; scattered clothes and Halloween candy wrappers on the floor; leftovers on a plate from the midnight snack; a picture on the wall that’s hanging crooked; things to do — and more. Like watching a movie one frame at a time, unable to grasp the plot. Like looking at myself in the mirror the morning after that Alliance Française party the last time I drank more than my share of beer.

Etymologically, the word “clutter” has 14^th century German roots, related to their word “clot,” like a blood clot, an obstruction, like a beaver dam obstructing the free flow of a trout stream.

I can’t straighten everything out in my allotted time, so I just sit there, doing nothing.

Then I remember a poem I’d once written called Zen.

wash the dishes

one by one

and before you know it

the last one’s done

I looked around with different eyes and noticed a colored sock in a corner of the room that had apparently fallen out of the laundry basket and had then apparently been batted around by the cats.

It took some effort, but I finally got up out of my office chair in front of my computer and walked across the room and picked up the sock. That’s when suddenly it came to me, like out of the blue, the pattern, the thing that applies wherever you go ­— a place for everything and everything in its place.

Oh, look! It goes over there, where it belongs, with its missing half, in its very own drawer.

Everything should have a place where it belongs and be in its place and then there’s no clutter.

I take the sock back to its home. It makes me feel like a little kid who’s just done something good. The clutter arranges itself into a pattern. I feel accomplished, like in control. I know I can do it. I can make sense of it all.

It was all so simple. Patterns always are. People, too, belong somewhere. A home, their oikos, where they feel like they belong, where they feel safe, where they can think straight. Until then, everything is clutter.

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