This Week In Words: Renovations

On February 8, 2015

I’m remodeling. And organizing. And cleaning.

Nothing is more conducive to creativity than an atmosphere which fosters it, both in style and functionality. I don’t work well in clutter, or mess or dysfunctional furniture or bad lighting. I like to surround myself with comfort and mood and a sense of spiritual calm, and feed my inner interior decorators and professional organizers some expensive carpet-covered symbolic cookies on occasion. Because who doesn’t like curling their bare toes in brand new carpet?

So yes, I’m remodeling. I have placed, with extreme purpose, statues and art and candles, I’ve painted and re-arranged furniture. I’ve organized and then organized what I organized. You know, boxes within boxes, the way all proper obsessive compulsive personalities should clean. I’ve even installed a new bath tub with drywall and floors to follow. Carpets are installed next week, so I’m packing things away and donating others and meticulously arranging my clothes by season and color, because I need this order in my life.

Order is amazing. Chaos can spark creative thought, but order…. order is the means by which that thought becomes reality. As philosopher Eric Hoffer said “Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature” and, lately, the wild nature of my life has been desperately clinging to whatever vestige of order it can find.

The last 10 months have been challenging on several levels, but also incredibly satisfying on many more. There is something to be said for facing difficulty and pushing onward despite it. For gathering up, inside myself, this power to move forward. It seems so small some days, this power, but when it’s needed most, it’s a mammoth of will and positivity. Those are the days when I can say with certainty I am capable of anything and, even if I’m sure to fail, I proceed to try. Try something new. Do it badly. Try something else. Do it worse. Try again and win. Win big, because the satisfying curl of patience and determination around a difficult time makes any accomplishment, no matter how small, seem monumental.

But every once in a while, we have to reinvent order, reign in the chaos so this power has room to manifest itself in our lives, and sometimes this requires the recognition of hoarding and the following acceptance of loss, of letting “things” move away from our center so creativity can settle there in its place.

Somehow, for me, this translates to a desperate need for tupperware and a label maker.

Bring. It. On.

Chaos aint got nothing on me.