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Wherein I embrace my messy desk!
For decades, I have waged a relentless war. The battlefield? My desk. Raised a military brat and a Southern Baptist to boot, the message I received on an almost daily basis was to keep my desk tidy. Organized. A place for everything and everything in its place. Cleanliness next to Godliness.
That was my training. However there is also my instinct, where the roiling chaos of my thoughts spills out into external world and onto my desk, resulting in stacks of papers here… piles of articles there… pens… paper clips… index cards… to-do lists… little reminder notes plastered on all surfaces. Basically looking like this:
And so the war plays out: The state of my desk will get so messy, my inner neatnik will rise up and assault the piles. I slash! I toss! I burn! Eventually I manage to get my desk to look something like this:
And I feel good about myself… for awhile. Then over time, the piles, the stacks, the clutter returns. This war goes on and on and on, back and forth, one extreme to the other, forever crossing my imaginary Maginot line with the predominance of the time spent in Messy Land… and with it an accompanying sense of Protestant shame.
