Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Wabi-Sabi and the Flow of Clutter
When Columbia University professors rail against your line of work, you have arrived.
Eric Abrahamson, author of A Perfect Mess, is not a fan of professional organizers. His take is that we are too hung up on neatness. Mess can be creative! Sometimes, it makes amazing things happen! Sometimes, he posits, neatness stifles brilliance.
Despite the fact that The Perfect Daughter is keen to label and sort, let it be known that I actually concur with his bit on neatness — albeit with caveats. I embrace messy, uncontrolled art projects, mixed-toy castles and a crowded countertop of market bounty. But I don’t really think anyone is served by not being able to find the last phone bill. Neatness for its own sake is useless.
One point Abrahamson misses is that people have different tolerances for mess. Ironically, I have a high threshold for mess, and it is a good thing, too, otherwise some of my clients’ homes (not yours of course!) would drive me batty. My experience — and this is true from Park Avenue to Avenue A –is that people with the lowest tolerance for clutter sometimes have the worst trouble. Organizing is about taking it all out, spreading it around, ordering it. In short, dealing with the mess. Some would rather just shove the offending piles in a box or a closet, until there are no more closets to fill.
I was very taken with the concept of wabi-sabi or “the beauty of imperfection” that Abrahamson discusses. A space that is too perfect is stagnant. Notice how interior design photos try to create a feeling of life with casually tossed throws over the arm of a sofa or a pile of books.
There is beauty in clutter. When I think of “the beauty of imperfection,” images of cracked plaster on a farmhouse in Tuscany (or a kitchen in Inwood) or weathered rocking chairs on a Jersey Shore porch come to mind.
I find that the imperfection that is most pleasing to me aesthetically is that which is truly organic: the fabulous Magna-Tile house (inhabited by Playmobil people) in the middle of the otherwise orderly living room, the abundance of bowls of fruit and vegetables that consume my kitchen counter on Saturday after the Farmer’s Market. It is when the Magna-Tile house is abandoned for a Lego tower, or the fruit becomes buried under permission slips that the imperfect beauty veers off into clutter.
For clutter, just like perfection, is stagnant. The key is motion. Only recent ‘architecture’ should be on display in the living room and fruit should be consumed before the next trip the the Farmer’s Market.
So keep the flow of your home and possessions going: Something comes in and something goes out. Aim not for perfection, but to see the wabi-sabi.