"Organized" Is in the Eye of the Beholder

     The other evening, my mother came into my room, looked at my shelves, and murmured, "How do you find anything in here?" To which I gave the inevitable reply: "I know exactly where everything is."

     How many times have we heard this short exchange? And which are you: the ask-er, or the answerer? Whichever you are may tell in the proverbial nutshell a great deal about your character. So you might correctly conclude that, being the answerer, I am somewhat less than neat, maybe even downright messy; but does it follow that I am also unorganized? Are all messy people unorganized, or are there degrees of messiness? And if there are, do these degrees somehow correspond to one's mental processes? Or is one's neatness or messiness an unconscious rebellion, if you will, against those processes? For instance, if one has difficulty organizing ideas into some cohesive whole, does one therefore make up for it by keeping shelves in admirable order, each object in its logical, prescribed place? Conversely, if one "lives" much inside one's own head, amusing oneself by making ordered sense out of random thoughts, does his physical environment pay the price by being neglected and, over time, disordered?

     There may be no easy, formulaic answers to any of these questions; I just put them out there in an effort to defend my own messiness.

     It is perfectly true, however, that I know exactly where everything is in my room, even though, to others' eyes, my shelves are a choked and hopeless jungle of books, file folders, journals, and binders. If you were to ask me to show you how my poem "Elegy" developed from initial concept, through all drafts and revisions, to the final product, I would be able to supply promptly all the relevant information; first, the file containing the rejected poem from which I culled the first line, then the notebook in which I drafted the first versions of "Elegy," then the file that contains typed copies with minor revisions, and finally the binder in which I keep the final version. And you would probably be agape that I could produce all that so quickly and efficiently from my so-called "mess."

     Were I more technologically oriented, all of the aforesaid would be in my hard drive and I would just open the pertinent files. Honestly, though—where's the challenge in that? Where's the fun?  Moreover, where would be the satisfaction in proving that I indeed do know where everything is? I submit that being messy has definite advantages—if nothing else, the mind is made sharper by the sheer exercise of keeping track of one's own mess. Organization begins and ends in the mind. Whether or not it manifests itself in one's surroundings is, IMHO, completely irrelevant.