Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Consistency
Remember Mr. Rogers? Remember how he would enter from the street and take off his shoes the same way every time? Then he would put on his “tennis shoes” and then take off his jacket, and finally put on a cardigan. It was very soothing, that little intro.
Consistency, Emerson said, is the “hobgoblin of little minds.” Maybe so, but who do you think could find their shoes in the morning, Mr. Rogers or Mr. Emerson? My money is on Mr. Rogers.
Consistency is something I struggle for. Like many of you, I am impulsive, creative, even flighty. To me consistency is a discipline worth cultivating. When I was young I disdained consistency; I thought it was dull and boring and I had a horror of boredom. My husband has taught me a lot in this regard. For a guy who used to manage nightclubs, he has more than a bit of Mr. Rogers in him. As I have gotten older and my life has gotten more complex, I have come to appreciate the little rhythms that we can control. Life is going to throw you curves, but if you have a scaffolding of consistent habits, you will be on more solid ground when those curve balls come at you.
When you are consistent, you don’t need to remember where you put something because you always put it in the same place. Shoes, protein bars, Band-Aids, whatever it is, it is always nice when you know where things are.
When I fill a client’s file cabinet with folders and all the tabs line up and all the labels are in the same font, that is a beautiful thing. The client looks at that file cabinet and they are reassured, there is order and clarity, they can find what they need.
When I get dressed in the morning, I make the effort to put my hanger to the right side of my closet so I am never rifling through clothes looking for hangers. Tiny thing, but it matters. We do laundry on the same day of the week and grocery shop on the same day of the week. We don’t run out of clothes, we don’t run out of food. This is good.
All these little consistencies add up. Being consistent is really building a habit. You have to be conscious of it at first, but if you practice it, it will become automatic.
And once it is automatic, you won’t have to think about it, and that will free you up think about more interesting things, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalism.