My name is Donna and I’m a bit of a neat freak. I could use some help.
But support on the issue of neat vs. messy is typically geared toward the messy folks. There’s a dearth of sympathy for those who fluff pillows and straighten chairs before leaving a room, afraid they’ll be caught living in their house instead of using it as a prop for a reality TV show.
Tidiness, of course, is a relative thing, on a continuum with plastic slipcovers on one side and beer-soaked fraternities on the other. It’s a comfort zone, deeply entrenched like politics, with the shipshape often getting a pretty good approval rating and not just from neurotic perfectionists and home staging professionals.
In fact, most of the world sees neatniks as aliens to envy, emulate, and sometimes hate for making the rest of you look unkempt.
But take heart; we’re not that happy. We spend a lot of time scanning to keep the mess in check when we could be doing something more instructive, fun or admirable like creating the mess.
Can one’s personal neat meter be moved?
Well maybe, why not, yes, I decided, after a friend’s recent gathering. She’s somewhere between neat and messy, basically normal. She figures if human beings have paid for a roof over their heads, they may as well use the space underneath it from time to time.
Talk about frugal.But on this particular night, normal meant a trip to the dark side; her black bra was draped for all to see in the bathroom. The bra was folded in half, not just thrown, as if waiting to be washed. Maybe she left it in plain sight so she wouldn’t forget, or maybe she was entertaining us in this clandestine way, giving us a peak where no peak had gone before.
She was obviously not in the habit of checking room-to-room every 13 minutes should dust accumulate on a hand towel.
How odd.I sort of wanted to tell her, and I sort of didn’t. I thought it was quite endearing actually. In some strange way, I felt I knew her better, and liked her even more.
The experience was, similar to her undergarment, uplifting.
In our world, the solution for the slovenly is fairly straightforward: Take organizational lessons and clean up your act. Or at least hire California Closets. It will make you feel better, work better, look better, save bouts of anxiety when you shove everything into a room and jam the door shut before company arrives.
Except for those errant things that defy squishing and hiding, like her lingerie or maybe what went into it.
But wisdom to the neat freaks is confounded. Perfectionism is a good thing, or a bad thing. Or sometimes good and sometimes bad. I remember being told before a job interview that if asked my biggest flaw, I should reply “perfectionism.” Come on, employers love it, accountants love it, and mothers-in-law especially love it when they do the white glove test.
Yet too much neat takes too much time, and who has that? My friend, for example, has finished her Ph.D., works two jobs, bikes miles a day, and is redoing her kitchen. Maybe neat is as neat doesn’t do, while messy is as messy does do.
Besides, isn’t pretty much everything in life messy: politics and relationships and travel and cake batter and hair first thing in the morning?
Why not houses too? Remember that old Zen saying: When the student is ready, the teacher – or is it the bra? – appears.
Donna Debs is a long-time freelance writer, a former radio news reporter, and a certified Iyengar yoga teacher. She lives in Tredyffrin. E-mail her at ddebs@comcast.net.
