For a long time, I have been mortified at my extreme ability to generate clutter. Now I am just amazed.
Leave me alone for a few minutes in a neatly arranged room with a laptop on top of a coffee table and chances are there will soon be no space on the coffee table for a cup of coffee. My space has always been a jumble of items jostling for space, not even pretending to be orderly about it.
And whenever someone else neatens it up, I tend to get lost in the neatness and keep forgetting where to find what! It’s not something am proud of, mark you. Heck, it’s not even something I should be writing about but such is the beauty of writing about writing. I can write about anything as long as it can be remotely connected to writing; any writing.
My laptop’s desktop, like my actual one is usually so full of icons (that have given up hope of getting filed away somewhere) it sometimes has no space for more. Needless to say, the paperless office is still a mythical creature that creeps up on me every once in a while when I sit at meetings with important people like Nat or Ndirangu, whose squeaky clean glass-topped desks with only miniscule computers (i-pads?) and not a fingerprint in sight tend to freak me out.
Clutter is a phenomenon I (and my long-suffering house-keepers, ex-wives and other partners) have grappled with for years, until the day I faced up to the simple truth: that to be unapologetically creative is both a gift and a curse; and that the ability to thrive under the chaos of clutter is just one of the many forms of the curse!
Now I did not come to that conclusion entirely on my own steam, but rather, I have checked out other people’s experiences and read a few blogs on the subject as well – the latter being mostly about how to cope with clutter and interruptions by people who, I can only argue/assume, are unable to handle the heat and should stay out of the kitchen.
Sample this:
“I wasted time by reading emails whenever they came into my inbox. I noticed that once I had started reading the name of the sender, I read the first line of the text. Once I mastered that, I continued reading the entire message, and once I got to that point, I felt compelled to respond because there was no point in leaving an already half-finished task. Then sometimes I needed extra information to answer the message, so had to add other tasks… [I] often wasn’t making any progress with what I was originally working on – and in the end felt quite breathless and exhausted. I thought I couldn’t be the only person struggling with this.”
~ Ulrich Weger, quoted by Lucy Tobin
The real clutter junkies don’t complain and offer no apologies. They just go with the flow and crush everyone who gets in the way. Andrew White, one of the best admen it’s ever been my pleasure to share a food-chain with – albeit from far way below – once fired his secretary for organising his desk while he was out for a meeting. “I couldn’t find a bloody thing on my desk,” he had complained later, still fuming at the frustration of it all.
“They think they are helping you,” he added with an amused giggle on hearing how I wished I could have thrown out my niece for organising my home office and colour-coding everything. “Help, indeed, ha!” we both agreed like two gay men saying “nothing” in unison when asked by straight people what they were up to sneaking out together like that.
Seriously though, there is nothing quite like the thrill of reaching for a friend’s phone number (that you wrote on the corner of your long-unused desk organiser several fortnights ago) by first lifting a few volumes and magazines from said corner.
Yeah right, I hear the neat and the organised brigade say.
They are forgiven. How are they to even remotely suspect that these seemingly annoying interruptions offer the creative mind limitless opportunities to stumble into mind-bogglingly inspired new ideas. So, while most writers grapple with ways to avoid the phenomenon of “writer interrupted”, I secretly welcome interruptions even as I blithely complain outwardly. And many are those who wonder about my seriousness when I tell them they’ve caught me at a bad time, yet offer to drink tea with them and chat about their hobbies. And although it is argued that research can always prove anything you want it to, I tend agree with research findings claiming that creative type employees who are denied Facebook and loud music are less productive than those who are not.
The puritans of neatness argue that a clear desk means a clear mind – I don’t doubt them. But a clear mind is certainly the last thing anyone needs when forced to consider several moodily lit pictures of toothpaste tubes and come up with a line that makes the carefully defined target audience (everyone!) believe that this new toothpaste is the best thing since Colgate… With dozens of half-baked ideas flying in and out at the speed of thought, each looking for something sensible to connect with, the barrenness of a neat, well-organised desk does not quite fit or help, does it? Neither does dead silence; or softly piped classical music.
Jazz, however, with its constantly shifting perspectives, is quite a different proposition altogether. So is Rock; and clutter – my favourite sin.
