A Client's Story

Quest For Simplicity, by Airlie Rose

In this entry, I want to talk about the joy and peace of ordering our home. I’m making progress. Always I’ve carried this vision of the perfect Quaker home. It is like the home of my friends Joyce and Bill. As you approach the door, you are gradually surrounded by lush green bushes, carefully tended. There are no scraps of paper, old projects, no half coiled hose to be seen. Just lush green, quiet, a sense of peace. You enter their home for a meeting and are greeted by a simple living room. Just enough furniture to sit on, stained wood floors, a coffee table with a bowl of strawberries and a plate of cookies, an offer of hot tea. She always has several varieties to choose from. This is a house where you never hear a radio or TV going somewhere in the back room. It is silent except for the tempo of the clock pendulum and the dong of the clock giving the silence a gentle structure.

At the beginning of this vacation, our house was the polar opposite of this. There were piles of paper hidden in collapsing laundry baskets under tables, boxes of gifts covered with misc. clothing, covered with random newspaper. We would lose our keys 5 seconds after we set them down. We couldn’t hide them in the basket by the door where they were supposed to go because that basket was so full there wasn’t room. Our daughter, just 19 months old, would carefully navigate all the piles and projects that littered the floor as she tried to find the second of the shoes she was trying to put on. The radio filled the house with news from NPR from dawn to dusk. Even now I just had to go silence the giant worm like beetle grub my husband left on the sci-fi channel as he went up to help my daughter get to sleep. How can anyone sleep or think when there are monsters snarling and people screaming from the other room?

So how do we get from here to there? I can’t claim we are there yet, but unlike many years past, years when my papers piled in piles, then I put the piles in bags and the bags and boxes went up to the ceiling. I think I see a way out, a way forward. It began with my friend Jenny (a life long Quaker with a three year old.) I was helping her pack to move and she confessed her “pile of shame”. Now, I hope she will forgive me for revealing her deep, dark secret, but in her cabinet she had a single pile of bills and misc. papers that she had not dealt with yet. And I reflected that her shame was reiterated throughout my house in perhaps a hundred variations, and I was living in a house of shame, and I wanted the shame to be over. When I admitted this to her and mentioned that we had three weeks set aside this holiday to transform our lives like some crazy reality TV show, she recommended that we try a professional organizer. I was mortified that we might throw money at this problem that should just require common sense and a bit of elbow grease, but that was the voice of my husband in my head (and later in person – I know him well). The reality was that to hire a guru to come look at our disaster of a home was a purifying step. Perhaps something akin to the confession at the beginning of an alk-anon meeting – “My name is Airlie and I am a pile maker”. More than that, though, it was bursting the bubble on the silent shame, making it open to the air, and the insight of someone who could give me the most powerful incentive for dealing with piles, hope.

She came and gave us something I never expected. Our house was not the worst she’d ever seen. In fact, she saw and acknowledged the work we had done in our baby steps towards a sane existence, and she knew the right questions to ask:

In a conversation on defining active projects, she asked exactly how many active projects I had going. I named about 8, then Josh added at least 5 more. I’m still adding some here and there. And here is the root of the piles. They form as I rush from one activity to another, trying to keep all the balls in the air without ever actually sitting down and counting them. I and my husband tend to only count the one or two balls that pay us money. They are our time sinks, right? That’s it. Ha ha. We volunteer for several different organizations, have two or three major projects we’re tackling with our home, Josh is applying for jobs, as a matter of fact so am I while maintaining 3. So things get piled. I empty my backpack from taking Tevah swimming so I can put the books in that I need for the staff meeting in case I run into that faculty member who is going to work on that research project for the conference in the Spring. You get the picture. And when in all this do the piles find homes or places that are safe from the raging tide of the packing and unpacking zone around the front door.

That is what I’m working on now, defining the space for the project boxes, blue crates lined-up on a freshly cleared desk top. Tevah likes to stack the “blue boxes”. There are only 8 of them. I have to trim my life to fit the space I live in. That may take a while, but in the end, each of my crates will be orderly and I will actually have time to notice what I have accomplished.

So, for the first time in a long time, there is hope. Many piles are gone and I am finding ways to make room for my life.

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