Snooping Through the Epicentre of Chaos

Who would have thought that cleaning your room can revolutionize your life?

All those years of tuning out when my mother reached the shrill octave - a frequency that young dogs and small children in trouble tune into - I now have a grand appreciation for the perfected reminder in a song that I wasn’t willing to listen to.

For the longest time I have been living out of a suitcase not literally but as a state of being. The suitcase ready-to-leave-for-my-next-adventure state of being. I am not one to ever settle down anywhere in particular. Up until recently I have always just had things in a state of slight disarray to a point where I am never entirely too comfortable in wanting to stay wherever I reside. That's just it: I have never been one for total comfort to the point where this situation would inevitably force me to charge over to the nearest coffee shoppe because I didn’t even like my own space.

I think it partially has to do with the fact that I haven’t lived anywhere for more than 4 years of time. Yes, I have lived in certain neighbourhoods, certain countries for entire decades but never in the same locations or under regular circumstances.

My wise roommate one day sauntered into my room. The Epicentre of Chaos would have been the title of the movie my room would have starred in had it been personified as la vedette. Tina stood in the doorway and quietly waited as it took me a few minutes to appear from behind the stack of papers I had going on for one of the clients I was working with.

“You know what we need to do?” She asked.

I knew full well what was going to come out of her mouth next but I wasn’t ready to hear the words breathed into existence just yet. Silently I was cringing in the nest that I had created in the corner. The we was really singular.

Pieces of paper for shavings, a little spinning desk chair, there I was, caught on the hamster wheel of life.

The we that Tin Tin was referring to was meant to be me and I knew that I was going to have to conquer the self-perpetuated mess.

Then, she started to describe how it needed to be placed and suddenly my room – in the context of how it should be in theory - just made total sense, an utter lightbulb moment; it allowed for a sense of freedom to overcome me.

So a month later after I managed to clear my schedule there I was, going through a spacial makeover. Everything changed places. Not a thing stayed the way it was.

When it was done, it was a masterpiece – in fact it still is. I want to be in my room. I desire to be organized and to know where I put things. I am busier than ever before in my life it just took that extra push to get me to reach that next level of efficiency.

Sam Gosling wrote a book called Snoop, what going through someone’s stuff says about them. He’s a psychologist that follows social behaviours and essentially he talks about what you can learn about a person by the state of their personal space before you meet them.

A good friend of mine and I were discussing this recently because he came out to visit me a long time ago and my room was in utter chaos. Like disgusting, I never wanted to be in it, didn’t really feel welcome, wanted to put my bed up for sale and sleep on the streets, kind of messy. A Massive State of Embarassment – one bigger than Alaska.

I watched Sam’s lecture recently and this put my life into a new perspective. There are three types of people: those that are organized, those that are unorganized and those that want to be organized.

I think I fall under the category of those that want to be organized. Although, I am more organized than I always gave myself credit for. And I attribute this to something that I learned while watching the lecture.

Sam made an interesting point to evaluate homosexuals’ spaces while they were in the midst of announcing their lifestyle to the world. His observation was that each space had no continuity. His attribution of this observation was that their lives are in a state of transition.

That’s when it hit me: I have never actually moved in anywhere because I am in constant assumption that my life should be in transition. Not in a lifestyle choice kind of way, but more in when’s-the-next-adventure kind of way - that I won’t be staying anywhere for long. It all makes a little more sense amongst this symphony of chaos. Who knew me and my proud friends that parade would have that in common? We are all human after all.

Check out the lecture. Fascinate your senses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfRgjW4hFcU