ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 7, 1997 TAG: 9704070037
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: Monty S. Leitch
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
IT'S SPRING, so I decided to Get Organized.
You know about this impulse: You look around your office at all the stacks of paper, at the piles of cardboard you've been promising yourself you'll use someday, at the books you're going to read and the correspondence you're going to answer, at the projects that need file folders and the file folders that need filing, and you say to yourself, "Boy, do I ever need to Get Organized."
So, last week I set to work. For two days and two nights (that might be a slight exaggeration) I moved around furniture, vacuumed hidden places, sorted through stacks of paper and stacks of cardboard and stacks of file folders, and, by golly, I Got Organized. After I was finished, I had six huge garbage bags to haul to the dumpster and two bags of books to give to the library.
Now, this morning, I sit here in my nice clean office, with no stacks anywhere threatening to fall over into the floor, wondering What To Do. On what shall I focus, now that my mess is gone?
While I was Getting Organized, I was thinking, "Wouldn't it be nice if I could get my mind as organized as my office?" I was thinking that would make me so much more productive: to have crisp, clearly defined file folders in my mind that would pop open on command, but that would stay out of sight (and out of mind) when closed and not needed. Rather like the Desk Top of my new, and hyper-organized, Windows95.
But, of course, that's not the way the mind works. The mind is always popping open irrelevant, and even stupid, file folders at inopportune minutes. While you're listening to the preacher, for instance, the worst file folder in your head is likely to pop open, the one labeled "Why Didn't I Say Something Intelligent Instead of Stumbling Around Yesterday When the Boss Called Me in For a Little Chat?"
Or, you're on deadline and just about to finish the most brilliant project of your life; you're right to the point where you're going to put in that amazingly intuitive idea you had in the night, when - Wham! - the file folder about your laundry pops open ("Don't Forget To Pick Up a New Box of Oxydol") and - Whizz! - there goes your intuitive revelation. Out with the wash water, so to speak.
Now that I've got my office organized, however, I'm wondering if getting my mind organized would be such a good idea, after all. Because, given the wacky way the mind works, it's possible that the laundry file might be just the thing to finish your project. It's possible that your amazingly intuitive idea was really, as Scrooge might say, "a bit of potato" clouding your thoughts, and the new thought, the cleaner one that follows right on the heels of the Oxydol, is really the one that's going to earn you kudos.
And, of course, the preacher may be just the person to give you the answer to "What I Might Have Said Yesterday"; the preacher might just put your little tiff in context.
Creativity lives in confusion. What's the saying? "A cluttered desk indicates a cluttered mind." But it's out of the crazy clutter of mind that innovation really springs. What if Alexander Graham Bell had had such a neat lab table that he'd not spilled any acid? Or, what if Albert Einstein had never worked in a patent office, using up most of his conscious mind on inanities?
What if Elias Howe had discounted his dreams while building a sewing machine?
The Zen Buddhists call the conscious mind "monkey mind." It's tiny and active, jumping around endlessly, demanding attention - but attention focused only on its own small self. It's one file folder, and then another file folder, and then another file folder, each of them screaming "Read me!"
"Wild mind" is that great expanse of unconscious: file-folderless, messy, too disorganized for stacks of any kind, even those about to tip over. But it is in wild mind that creativity lives: swooping around from this to that, making the new connections.
So. Here I sit. Completely Organized, as far as the eye can see. But inwardly, where the eye can't see a thing, the file folders are popping like crazy and little, scrappy notes drift aimlessly in the breeze.
And thank goodness for that. Otherwise, how could I write?
MONTY S. LEITCH-is a Roanoke Times columnist.
LENGTH: Medium: 78 linesby CNB