Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter

Magical Thinking

I’m not a magical thinker. I wish I was. I like to think of myself as creative and imaginative, but what I am not is fantastical. When I was a child my favorite books were all firmly grounded in reality, usually a somewhat harsh reality: Little House in the Big Woods, Little Women, The Little Princess (okay, I guess it is fantastical that an anonymous benefactor would leave you luxurious gifts in your garret… but man, what she did with that garret! talk about shabby chic!) I was not a fan of the Narnia series, The Phantom Tollbooth left me cold. I liked realism, preferably with long dresses. When my mother asked me to polish the silver for Thanksgiving Dinner I pretended I was a maid in a big English manor. That silver gleamed.

I’ve come to suspect, however, that many of you, my dear clients, are fans of fantasy. You are masters of magical thinking, the laws of space and time don’t hold you back, you dream big. But I, having been brought up on a steady diet of suffering heroines, I know that everything is always harder than you think it will be (poor Ma Ingalls, fire, locust and Dengue fever… all in one book!) and it will take longer than you think. Mrs. March warned her daughters, life is hard, and I listened.  So, when my clients think they can go through 30 years of paper in a day, I shake my head. When they think they can pack an apartment where they’ve lived for a decade in a weekend- I marvel at their optimism. I don’t want to be negative, but I have to be the voice of reason. No, I cannot fit all those clothes into this closet, no matter how well I fold. No matter how many times you call me magic (and I appreciate it, I really do), I am not magic. The laws of physics still apply.

And speaking of the laws of physics, Einstein’s law of relativity is relevant here too. Einstein said that space and time are inextricably linked. Yup. And to crazily oversimplify: What alters time? Mass. So to make this into a metaphor about your closet, the more mass/volume/stuff you have shoved into your closet… the longer it is going to take to go through it, or to find anything in it. When you have less clutter (mass), you have more time. It is a fact.

So, you wonderful, magical-thinkers: pretend you are an organizer, spend 10 minutes every day plowing through papers, tossing, filing, creating order out of chaos.  And start purging the minute you begin thinking about moving. Even if it isn’t for a year. Winnow your clothes until they fit in your closet. It will take days, perhaps many months, but persistence pays off. If you don’t believe me, when you next sit down to indulge in Westworld or Sandman, take a pass and check out Little Women, and you’ll see: quiet persistence may not be as exciting as a magic wand or a portal to another dimension, but here in the real world, it is pretty darn effective.