Pre-Order

In this series, I’m delving into the virtue of order. What exactly do we mean by order? Here’s what our boy Ben Franklin had to say:

Let all your things have their places. Let each part of your business have its time.

I looooove order. Probably too much. I can be fussy about order. My brain basically hiccups insistently until I put things in order. Clothes must be folded in the right way. The toilet paper must go over the roll. Pantry items must line up and face outward within the cabinets just like they do on all those beautifully even stacks and rows on grocery store shelves. I cannot tolerate doors or drawers being left open, even if someone is, say, actively putting glasses away in a cabinet. If I’m in the room, I must close the door between each trip back to the dishwasher. I mean, I do try to stick around and open the door for the poor person who has to p̶u̶t̶ ̶u̶p̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶m̶e̶ put the dishes away, but the bottom line is that doors must stay closed. One night, my darling husband climbed into bed and whispered that he had opened one door somewhere in the house and he wasn’t going to tell me where. He felt terrible when, hours later, I was standing in the garage trying not to cry because I couldn’t find the open door anywhere in the house. {SPOILER: he was messing with me. He’s a silly dude who simply underestimated how much doors really must be closed.}

Yeah, maybe I love order too much.

There are some beneficial aspects to my orderliness. I rarely lose things. I rarely procrastinate. Bills get paid and things get taken care of. But the aspect of order I’m particularly interested in examining this month is that second part: let each part of your business have its time. I struggle with that part. I find it difficult to remember to eat or get up and move or simply put work down when it’s time to stop and have some fun with the people around me. I’m lucky enough to have a thoughtful kid like Q, who hijacks my phone and programs alarms with messages like this:

Q’s Clues.

Q is sweet but he also knows me well. I think one of my favorite writers, Gabriel García Márquez, spilled my secret in his short novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. (My secret isn’t salacious. Get your mind out of the gutter):

I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind, but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.¹

While García Márquez’s words are, I think, literally true for me, I think his novel is thematically true as well. The unnamed protagonist spends his life indulging in one thing that he has confused with another. In the novel’s case, the protagonist spends his life indulging in sex when what he really wants is connection. I suspect that my proclivity for order is a substitution as well; my approach to order is a quest to keep scary chaos away. And like García Márquez’s protagonist, I don’t really understand the true nature of the things I seek and avoid.

So here’s how I’m going to begin practicing order this month: I’m going to set one alarm to eat and one alarm to go for a walk each day during the work week. And then I’m actually going to eat and walk. The goal is to work on giving each part of my business its time. I need to attend to the business of not working until I’m a̶ ̶h̶a̶n̶g̶r̶y̶ ̶s̶h̶e̶-̶b̶e̶a̶s̶t̶ overextended. Because we all know what they say about too much work and not enough play.

I’m curious: do you struggle with order? Share your thoughts with Team Icarus on social media or in the comments below!

Notes

Image by igorovsyannykov from Pixabay.

1. Márquez Gabriel García, and Edith Grossman. Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Vintage International/Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 65.