Organizing
“Organizing
is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is
not all mixed up.”
A. A.
Milne
I've written before about
the ebay business I have with my sons. We have about 3000 listings in
an anchor store. Most of the shipping is done by me, from my
basement, which means that I have to be organized. I sort boxes by
size and have packing in bins and the listed items all in one room.
If I did not organize it would take ten times as long to get the
shipping done everyday.
When my mother made soup,
she chopped all the vegetables by hand—each had to be exactly the
same size as the one before it. It took her all morning, but she made
really tasty soup. When she set out to make a quilt, she cut every
single piece first and stacked them by shape. When my father made
potato soup—his one claim to fame in the kitchen—he somehow
managed to involve every pot and pan in the pantry so that when he
finished, the kitchen looked like the aftermath of a nuclear
holocaust. He made good soup too, but oh, my lord, what an incredible
mess. Two very different approaches, same outcome...sort of.
Being able to organize is
a necessary skill in almost every discipline except possibly visual
art. And even then, one must care for one's brushes and paints.
People tell me, “I don't cook because it makes such a mess, and I
hate cleaning up.” That's an organizational problem. Most folks
think that they are either organized, or they aren't, but truly, it's
a learned skill. If you want to be productive, organizing ahead of
time cuts down on the stress and mess in the aftermath. I want to say
there's an app for that, but I think it's a matter of actual human
learning. It requires willingness to put time and thought into a
rational approach to whatever it is you want to accomplish.
Organizing is a good
spiritual practice—it causes you to slow down, think it through,
maybe even make a list of what you will need. In this world of
helter-skelter go..go...go, taking time to actually sit with
something and make a plan is almost a form of meditation and prayer.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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