Order and Chaos

If you take a look around my room, it's a mixture of organization and chaos, part of it is neat and tidy, and then part of it is an area where everything gets put until I deal with it later.  This reflects my mentality and my attitude to a lot of things in life, I put things in order and make sense of the world, and anything that doesn't fit gets put to one side in one big pile until I come back to it at some point and figure out where in my world it's supposed to fit.

I have known people who live in complete chaos, people whose bedrooms I have stepped into and they look like an episode of hoarders and yet, to them, they knew where everything is, and there was a method to the madness.  I couldn't live like that personally, I can tolerate a certain level of disorder but if things get too much I do get to a point where I can't sleep and I have to get up and tidy things before I can actually lie down and sleep in that environment. 

I do believe our environment represents our internal state to an extent, however I am not sure how much the opposite can be said to be true, that is, that our environment affects our internal state.  I don't feel a disorganization in my mind when I am surrounded by clutter or when that pile of things to sort gets a little too high.  The act of organizing does provide some catharsis for me.  Whenever I feel like things are getting a bit hectic in my life, I take some time to organize things around me and it does make me feel better but I don't think that environment is what causes that feeling, if anything it's usually something completely unrelated that has made me feel that way, and the act of organization gives me something to distract myself with in a way that means I don't have to think about whatever caused me distress.

I know some people who take this idea to extremes, where they create time tables, lists, and schedules to live their life by.  I can't commit to that level of routine, it's not conducive to a mentality that relies on creativity and spontaneity.  If I were to engage in that level of routine and organization of my life I would feel dead inside, that's not hyperbole, that's speaking from prior experience. 

My time spent in High School is a very good example of a time where there was an almost military precision to the routine I had to follow.  Everyone wore the same colour uniform, the same design, no individuality, there were policies that dictated everything from hair styles to footwear.  Classes were a set duration punctuated by a bell that rang every 40 minutes signalling a time to move from there to the next class.  Everyone followed time tables, attendance was recorded, behaviour monitored, merits given for consistency, demerits given for breaches, penalties given for consistent violations.  The whole experience was miserable, it's not surprising then that this was a time of my life when I started to write more often.  I created an entire world of fantasy that came with background and lore that covered 7,000 years of history - none of which will ever see the light of day partly because it was lost when a hard drive died and partly because even if I could recover it, I know it would be incredibly embarrassing if anyone was to read it now.

I need a level of freedom in my life that balances order and chaos keeping the two in harmony.  I need to be able to do whatever I want whenever I want and meet my obligations at the same time.  The only way that I can achieve this is by grouping together tasks in such a way that they can be processed in batches.  Things like mail get thrown into a pile where I can sort it all in one go at a later date.  I know some people will argue that you should do things daily as you go along, but to me that distributes workloads to an extent where you create redundancy.  It's much more efficient at least for me to be able to do it all in one go rather than spending parts of my time here and there doing something with a focus that isn't dedicated to the task at hand but is preoccupied with how much time there is to achieve the task.

If you took this mentality and applied it to school work then I would have thrived much more if you had devotes a few hours on one day to one subject, a few hours later to another, and so on and so forth rather than splitting one subject up into five classes or more spread over five days.  You never spent long enough in one subject to be able to latch on mentally to what you were trying to learn.  I would go so far as to say that the things I have had the most success learning later in life were things that I sat down and focused on without dividing my attention between them and anything else.  To quote Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory, "The best way to achieve a goal is to devote 100% of your energy to it" this is something I realised a long time ago and that is something I continue to live by.