The Mess and I

I have this obsession about coffee tables. I wonder if you share it, because no one in my family seems to.

You see, I like to be able to put the tray with coffee pot, cups, perhaps even a plate of biscuits, down directly onto the coffee table without detouring via a precarious perch on the sofa or even down as far as the floor first, while with the non-tray holding hand I clear off the newspapers, the books, the half- finished craft projects, the tree decorations that have fallen off, the homeless dvds, the …well, you get the idea.

Coffee tables are for coffee cups, say I. And I had a little tantrum to that effect on Christmas Eve as I brought a tray of coffee, complete with mince pies and had to fight to land them safely in the living room. My family, even including visiting Grandpa, who should hardly have been included in my tirade, jumped smartly to it and lo! the coffee table was bare.

I was a little shame-faced though about stamping my foot over such a minor irritation, and next time I was online I felt a New York Times article called “Saying Yes to Mess” was calling out to me. It made me laugh out loud and I even showed it to Grandpa so we could chuckle together about January 2007 being Get Organized Month (in America.) and about the $5.9 billion, yes, billion dollars, the US spent on ‘home-organising’ products in 2005. Coffee table incident aside, I will not be joining in. For at heart, I go along with some of the people quoted in the NY Times article, to whit:

Life is too short and there are more urgent things to worry about. As Rabbi Irwin Kula says “Order can be profane and life-diminishing.” My daughters would agree with that, and so would the Rabbi’s own daughter. He tells how he and his wife were freaking out about the state of their 15 year old’s room. “Suddenly, I see in all the piles the dress she wore to her first dance and an earring she wore to her bar mitzvah. She’s so trusting her journal is wide open on the floor and there are photo-booth pictures of here friends strewn everywhere. ‘I said, Omigod, her cup overflows!’ And we started to laugh.”

I also liked the quotes from a self-styled (and one hopes tongue-in-cheek) ‘mess analyst’, that mess “has resonance; it can vibrate beyond its confines and connect to the larger world. It was the overall scumminess of Alexander Fleming’s laboratory that led to his discovery of penicillin….Mess tells a story, whereas, neat – well, neat is a closed book.”

My daughters still quake as I approach the coffee table, and race to clear the clutter off it, but with my new improved approach I shall now watch the narrative of the rich variety of my family’s hobbies and personalities resonate before me and plonk my coffee cup elsewhere.