Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter

What if We Don’t Want to Go Back?

Don’t get me wrong: I want nothing more than to get back to work, go to the theatre, and see my friends in the flesh, but all this sheltering at home has given me time to reflect—and one thing I’ve been reflecting on is busyness.

I came of age in the ’80s. Women were supposed to have it all: careers, kids, great marriages and, of course, hot bodies. Thirty years later we’re supposed to have all that and catalog it beautifully on social media. I’m tired just reading that sentence.

Ever since I got my first datebook, in high-school, I’ve been busy. In retrospect, a lot of the time I wasn’t as busy as I thought I was, and certainly a lot of what I was busy with wasn’t as important as I thought it was, but I was certainly running around.

As I’ve gotten older and my actual responsibilities have increased (like earning a living and caring for children), my priorities have shifted. I shucked off things that kept me busy before I had kids, and settled into a different life—but I was still busy.

But now in this weird, liminal, covid time, I’m not busy. I can only ask my teenagers so many times if they have done their schoolwork. I do what I need to do: write, clean, cook, shop online for toilet paper; but I’m not busy. I feel an unwinding that is unfamiliar, but not bad.

I’ve argued that much of our clutter comes from the speed at which we live. Buying something you are pretty sure you already have because you don’t have time to find it; not putting things back where they belong because you’re in a rush, or never making time to really deal with your mail are all guaranteed to produce clutter. But now you have time. You have time to see what you really have (everything you need, probably, with the possible exception of toilet paper), you have time to put everything back, and now you not only have time to go through your mail, you have time to get yourself off all the mailing lists that send you junk.

My husband keeps saying that the world will never be the same, and I’m not sure he’s wrong. I can’t wait until this is over—but at the same time, maybe when it is over, we’ll make a new world, where we have more time to think, more time to cook and where rushing around isn’t a status symbol.