Still a mess

A messy update..."The Benefits of Mess":
Flexibility - to adapt and change more quickly, more dramatically, in a wider variety of ways, and with less effort.
Completeness - more able to comfortably tolerate an exhaustive array of diverse entities
Resonance - an easier time falling into harmony with is environment and with otherwise elusive sources of information and change, deriving useful influence form them.
Invention - mess randomly juxtaposes and alters a system's elements and rotates them to the fore where they're more easily noticed, leading to new solutions
Efficiency - able to accomplish goals with a modest consumption of resources and can sometimes shift the burden of work to the outside world.
Robustness - because mess tends to loosely weave together disparate elements, messy systems are more resistant to destruction, failure and imitation.

The next chapter describes the types of messy people. I wonder what kind I am? I've been known to be obsessive with neatness and order, but I've always had it in my mind to try and get the most work done with the least amount of effort. Thus leaving more time for leisure activities. For example, if I'm going to the basement to get something, I try to take to the basement something that needs to go rather than go down empty handed and end up making two trips. This method can be practical some times, but entirely frustrating when trying to make several stops to different stores on a single outing while also traveling with children. Enter: Walmart and the boom of one-stop shopping. (another topic for another time) The other side of me sees the enormous benefits of the messiness and stability of organic gardening with regards to disease/pest resistance, soil moisture retention, etc... Then there's the orderliness required with babies learning to crawl and who, out of curiosity, like to empty shelves, bins, etc... I look about the house with its toy-covered floor I've accepted that the toys don't need to always be put away. As long as there's a pathway between the rooms/bathroom so as not to cause bodily injury during the night then what's to worry about. Speaking of night time.....

What a mess....

Before you watch any more HGTV or Martha Stewart; before you buy that next issue of Real Simple; before spending (any more of) your money at the Container Store or Organized Living....Read this: A Perfect Mess, the book, or A Perfect Mess, the blog. They pull back the curtain on the organizational "industry" and look in-depth at the cost/benefit of putting forth the time and money to "get organized" when you might actually have less stress or increase profits if you just do what you know and quit worrying about if others think you're a mess. To put it very briefly, not to mention hitting a little close to home, "When people are anxious about their messy homes and offices or their disorganized schedules, it's often not because the messiness and disorder are causing problems, but because people simply assume (author's italics) they should be neater and more organized and feel bad that they aren't." The authors aren't talking about "chaos theory, complexity theory, networking, emergent behavior (?), self-organizing systems, distributed management, or any of the anti-centralized-control theories..." Rather, "mess for what it is -- a lack of order." This book is for everyone, whether or not you admit to being a neat-freak, because as they put it "Being messy and disordered and disorganized, as we mean it, is just what you probably think it is: scattering things, mixing things around, letting things pile up, doing things out of order, being inconsistent, winging it." In other words, everyone. Well, ok, everyone except you that is. I wouldn't dare presume otherwise.

"If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?" -- Albert Einstein