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Like you, I live in a cave. With more than one room, a stuccoed ceiling and with walls painted eggshell white: All the better to mount my paintings. But still, a cave. A container. A bowl holding my memories and hopes while offering a place to relax. But like you, maybe, I have something that interferes with my relaxation: Clutter.
I say “like you” because so many of us have clutter. Actually, my friend Nancy is very uncluttered. Nancy says she even does the thing of, “one object goes out for every object that comes in.” Naturally she has no books! Her place is nice and empty, but then again, maybe Nancy’s closets are over-stuffed.
I confess I am the opposite of Nancy; she says I have “a very low sense of order”: I never reach out to straighten something on my desk to be at a right angle. Moreover, I’m an intellectual with a degree: I do enjoy reading, don’t enjoy tidying, and I won’t whistle while I’m working. As my bookworm sister puts it, “Always, after I clean house, I feel depressed.”
I like to read stories of how someone has beaten clutter, just as I like to hear stories of how someone has lost weight. It happens. As for dieting, if there are so many resources and schemes for dieting, and schemes for how to declutter, then in the face of this information colossus, we could, in theory, all be living a celery-thin existence inside our echoing egg shell caves. Yet the only time my place has ever echoed was when I first moved in, without any drapes up. Unless I move again, or unless there’s a blessed house fire—praise the Lord—I will see the pearly gates before I ever see my place looking as minimalist as the inside of an oyster shell.
I own my own cave, where I can try to relax, but no, I’m not as happy as a clam. To me, something about my plight sounds familiar: Like hearing about a lady who can’t feel good about herself until losing those last ten pounds; like a student who can’t enjoy watching The Simpsons until her term paper is done; like the man in credit card debt who thinks he is “supposed to” live on cat food until debt-free. Well. When I hear myself saying “I really should” or a child-like “s’posed to” then I know I “really should” give myself an attitude adjustment.
Sometimes an adjustment ain’t easy. Recently I was sitting in my rocking chair, in my cave, literally chewing on celery, and feeling a silent laugh—not about the celery—as I reflected on my life: The last time I had moved, packing up my books from the tops of dressers and rough utility closet shelves and stacks in corners and bulging boxes, I had found a book or two on getting my home organized. Or three or four. In fact, I confess I found six, one was by a guy in a 12-step program, Clutterers Anonymous. Remembering this last book, I stopped rocking, stopped chewing too. Frozen by an idea, as if I had peeled a figurative onion down to another layer.
I thought: What if my clutter is my alcohol? What if my pervasive low-grade anxiety about clutter is merely masking my high-grade anxiety about my life? Maybe addiction to anxiety-guilt about clutter has a payoff? Keeping life away? Like the lady avoiding the beach, the guilty student avoiding her peers in the campus bar with the big screen for viewing The Simpsons, like the guilty debtor who has to avoid restaurants?
A disturbing thought, to be ameliorated with a sense of proportion: The lady might do fewer beaches, the student might do fewer bars; they have anxiety, but they aren’t going to be totally beach-less and bar-less. At least, not the student. Sadly, it seems sure to me there is a significant connection, subtle and strong, between having less fun and having no fun. Between going to bars less frequently, and barring all bars. I wish I could say I only do the former, not the latter. But no. I’m deprived.
So in my cave every evening I am contained in guilt. In theory, it would be so easy to walk over and reach for a classic DVD, or an ancient text of Greek legends. Or take out a coffee table book to marvel at those pictures by the master. Or take a refreshing sip of poetry, or open a gorgeous comic book, or the fairy book of Yeats, or … But no. Better to watch yet another DVD television show where I can clean while pressing “pause” for commercial breaks. Because I’m “s’posed to” declutter or clean or something, right now, this very evening. Or “s’posed to” have decluttered earlier today, when in screaming reality I was s’posed to have earlier worked on some Great Project.
It lumpens my throat when, without warning, I peel my onion down to yet another layer and view myself “eating cat food.” Never mind escaping life in general: What if I am escaping from writing my Great American Novel, or composing my Great Folk Ballad or—or—escaping some great work that lies invisible within me, whatever it might be? It’s just too easy to be lazy when I’m obsessed with being lazy about clutter.
Stupid clutter. I think even Sisyphus, rolling his stone up that hill, would give me a sideways glance to say, “Really? You don’t see anything crazy about this picture?” Nevertheless I keep rolling my stone while never having permission to saunter across the side of the hill to see the Emerald City. If I can’t abruptly abandon my clutter-guilt, then maybe at least I could start by propping a rock under my stone, and bending down to smell a rose. Heaven help us all.
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Sean Crawford
