The get-organized movement is everywhere these days. I am a bit baffled that there has been such widespread discontent about not having things in a twig-shaped box lined with organic cotton and placed on a shelf exactly two paces from where you put your shoes.
The multimedia blizzard is insisting that if you just think it through, you’ll see the light. It’s time to clean up, dump, discard, stop cluttering up your life and put it all in preferably a newly purchased box on a well-hung shelf in a freshly painted and updated room to reflect your beautiful new intentions.
I’m beginning to feel like a hamster on a wheel. The first thing that goes in all the new plastic boxes is my shoes. Having survived the black wardrobe era of the ’90s, I have boxes full of black shoes that I can’t part with. You never know when pink will be out and black will return.
Of course, once you start on shoes, it is easy to get caught up in the closet of things I’m not sure I need. But the organizing geniuses are saying I need to love my clothes. So I look at each garment in my closet and ask, “Will I still love you tomorrow? Are we just friends? Do you love me?”
I’m ready for a margarita after the closet of discontent. I need a pick-me-up. So I mosey over to the medicine cabinet. Surely this can use some sorting. What I need inside this cabinet is a wall. On one side I will put the naturopathic stuff for colds, coughs and allergies, and the elixirs for preventing all of the aforementioned offensives.
On the other side I will put the stuff from over-the-counter and behind-the-counter. The pharmaceutical stuff for the nonbeliever in our household, me. This is where the hard-core prescriptions for colds, coughs or allergies are. There is nothing for prevention. Hmm. I never noticed this before. Maybe I will reconsider my allegiance to this side of the wall.
But not today. To throw out my collection of prescriptions would be too much of a leap. I am hugging my prescription of Allegra, begging it not to leave me. I love you more than all the black shoes.
I need to pull myself together. Close the medicine cabinet and move on to my desk or, worse yet, my filing cabinet. I can’t stoop this low. Everything is already in some sort of organization in there. I am just deluding myself. The real crisis awaits me in the garage. I can’t ignore it by sitting and rewriting labels on my files. I haven’t used 90 percent of these files in the past decade. I never know how to find anything once I file it because I can’t remember what I called it. Am I the only one this happens to?
Maybe the organizing officials can sell preprinted labels, not those useless blank ones.
I look around my home office and I start glaring at the wicker rocker. What are you still doing here? I swear I’m going to put you on eBay. No one ever sits on you. You just have piles of laundry on your seat at all times. You’ve turned my home office into a laundry room. After serious threats that you cannot hold all the clothes hostage and the clan finally comes to remove the clothes, you still hang on to all the mismatched socks.
What good is one sock?
I reach into my purse like I’m going to pull out some threatening object, but, of course, all I get is a handful of disorganized items yanked from the depth of my purse.
Sarri Gilman is a freelance writer living on Whidbey Island. Her column on living with meaning and purpose runs every other Tuesday in The Herald. She is a therapist, a wife and a mother and has founded two nonprofit organizations to serve homeless children. You can e-mail her at features@heraldnet.com.
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