Bringing the World to Life, part V: Everything in its Right Place

Part I :: Part II :: Part III :: Part IV

When I came up with the idea of this "Bringing the World to Life" series, this was the post I've had my eyes on the entire time. It took me a few entries to get around to it, but I'm finally here, and I hope that the general picture I'm painting will come into focus after the next few thousand words.

It has to do with cleaning my room. Now, along with most grown-up American children of this day and age, I'm quite an expert at cleaning my room. Done it hundreds of times, for sure. Stuffing things under the bed, jamming things in the closet, squeezing things into drawers -- there aren't many new tricks these days. All the little secrets seem to have been figured out long ago. Not much new or suprising anymore. Its always the same old deal -- clean your room, watch your room slowly deteriorate into slop over a few days (or weeks or months), and then start all over again. This was the way things seemed to go, and I never thought twice about it.

Until a few months ago.

You see, in the last couple years of my life, as I've boldly entered the post-college world, I've come to expect certain things of myself. Among these things is a general lifestyle outlook that is concerned with personal growth. At all times and in all things I do, am I on the way to becoming a better person? A more complete me? Am I making personal progress or falling behind? I don't speak of mere economic "progress" or the kind that can be measured in any way. Instead, I'm talking about inner-growth, inner-progress, and all things having to do with the good stuff happening inside of me.

And one of things I became aware of -- as mentioned in a previous post on this series -- was my yearning to become as fully human as possible... to become all that I am capable of becoming. .. to rise above my animal impulses. I've been realizing that this is no longer a task that is to be put off until the distant future. The days of innocent youth were over. That "distant future" is right now, today, and everyday. The time to get these things done is now. Was I going to settle for a life good enough for an animal, or was I going to expect my fully human potential t0 shine through?

In regard to cleaning your room, it goes like this. To our animal selves, we don't really need too clean of a room. Ultimately, as long as we can get from the door to our dresser to our bed (and so forth), than we're all set. I mean really, why does it have to be clean? Isn't that just a waste of time? After all, if we leave our clean laundry out instead of putting it away, doesn't that save us from wasted effort? Why push in drawers when we're done -- aren't we just going to open them again soon enough?

I could go on, but I trust the general idea is clear -- if we're to live like an animal, these things would indeed be fine for us. Why bother for anything better; why strive for anything more? Aren't there more important things we could be worrying about?

Maybe there are. And for a long time, I was probably concerned with those very *other things* myself, giving no second thought to the fact that my room kept falling apart, even after I "cleaned" it every few weeks.

And here is the kicker -- I wasn't really cleaning it. For the last many years, at least, I never was. What I was doing was making it look organized... you know, putting stuff "out of the way" so that there was no clutter and lots of open space. But is that really clean? Is that really what we're looking to do in cleaning our room?

These questions in mind, I stood before my dirty room a few months back. I'd had enough. I had lived in this place for over a year now, and since I moved in I was never happy with the standard of cleanliness I'd initially set for myself. My room might have been 80% set up from the start, I thought to myself. 80% is good enough for an animal (its functional, it works, it does the job). But its not clean enough for the human I want to be. And, by God, the day has come. Here I go.

So I went to town. And slowly, I saw what had to be done. It wasn't merely getting rid of the clutter and making everything merely look organized. For, when you take that approach, the things you displaced (socks, magazines, CDs, etc) will slowly find their way back to their nomadic nature. The very problem, it became clear to me, was all my stuff didn't have a home... it didn't have its very own place where it belonged. If your city has a problem with homeless bums all over glitzy 5th avenue, one solution is to bus them uptown and dump them off in a park or something -- temporarily maintaining the illusion of cleanliness. But with nowhere to go and nowhere to properly belong, the homeless will inevitably creep back to the place where it makes the most sense for them to be. In this case -- 5th avenue. Same problem all over again.

In short, I had to provide a home for the homeless. I had to create a space of belonging for each object and put it there. I had to put everything in its right place.

And so I did. All it really required was the strength of will to see it through. Looking around the room, I assessed the "problem zones" (like Iraq!) and dismantled them. No longer would they be havens for the homeless insurgent junk throughout my room. I overhauled my bookshelf... my closet... under the bed... and all my drawers and shelves. And then it was easy -- there was plenty of space for everything to have its own home. Just like that, my room was finally clean.

At first, it wasn't that big a deal. It looked only a little "neater" than it normally did after a good clean. But this was the planting of the seed. The real magic began to happen in the following weeks.

For, as the days and weeks (and eventual months) went on, I began to notice something happening. Whenever I was finished with a book or CD or my guitar or a pair of socks, these objects now had a place to return to... a home (of sorts) to go back to... a space in which they belonged. I imagine you know what I mean when I say that it is our dedication to putting things away that can keep a room neat and clean. But in this new situation I found myself in -- where everything had a place in which it belonged -- these many objects seemed to want to return to their right place.

When I took off my dirty clothes at the end of the day, they wanted to be put in the newly positioned laundry basket. When I brought clean clothes up from the laundry room, they wanted to be put in the freshly organized closet and dresser drawers. When I finished reading a book or brought home a new magazine, they wanted to find their place in the newly arranged bookshelf. The drawers and my computer chair wanted to be pushed in. The lights wanted to be turned off when I left the room. My bed wanted to be made after I woke up in the morning.

On and on and on, it became clear -- it was as if my room was coming to life. All of these inanimate objects -- as funny as it may sound -- became alive, in a certain way. And once I got the first inkling of this impression -- it took off. I began to notice it everywhere.

Ultimately, then, this experience of cleaning my room provided me with something far greater than a neat and aesthetically pleasing living environment. For the lack of a better phrase, it started to bring my world to life. No matter where I turned, I could not escape it. My desk at work. My car. The lunch I make. The laundry I fold. The gas I pump. The trash I take out. All of these things were seen with new eyes. The world was opening itself up to me in a way it never had. And it was only the beginning. A rolling stone had rippled its way into an avalanche, and the world I saw it would never be the same.