In the last few days, I’ve had conversations with a lot of people related to organization and space-setting. I’ve come to what I think may be an important insight:
Personal management, both of space and time, is too important to be left to the uptight.
Phrased another way,
Organization is for flakes, too.
Now, I don’t think of myself as a flake, although flakiness certainly enters into some of what I do. And most people don’t think of themselves as flakes, even if they are to the rest of us.
So I’ve decided to compile a set of maxims or aphorisms about getting rid of junk that may appeal to the pronoiac, New-Age navel-gazer in your life, who may very well be you:
1. Your chi flows in harmony with the eternal jin-energy only if your house is clean and organized.
2. Piles of clutter are fairy rings for boggarts, boggans and other spirits of negativity.
3. You don’t have to free your house elves; just give them less work by cleaning up.
4. Your stuff is clogging the free radicals in the ionosphere.
5. It’s bad karma to leave so much stuff lying around.
6. Good karma will accrue to you from recycling and releasing your accumulations of unnecessary possessions to the universe.
7. You’ll have space to lay out your yoga mat when you get rid of that awful coffee table.
8. Those computer games you don’t play are releasing harmful CFCs and radiation into your personal space, man.
9. Your house has some good vibes since you cleaned up, dude.
10. The Tree of Life spreads its sephirotic branches more easily in open spaces.
11. The holiest place in the Divine Temple was completely empty.
12. You will improve the flow of the Light by clearing some stuff out of your house.
13. Your Feng Shui bagua chart is blocked by this ugly sofa/ripped loveseat/grandma’s broken chair.
14. The Daemons of Bad Finance are really attracted to this stack of unopened bills.
15. Burning incense or sage isn’t going to clear your space as quick as throwing shit away.
16. Before setting circle with your coven, clear space by ritually throwing away extra stuff that doesn’t belong in your circle or your house.
17. A real witch draws strength from the orderliness of the universe: as above, so below.
18. Your crap gets in the way of a houseful of welcome guests bringing wonderful presence and presents.
19. Love flows into empty rooms more easily than into crowded rooms.
20. Western dragons are evil and lie around on heaps of treasure; Eastern dragons are good and dance and play everywhere in heaven and earth.
Everyday Answers and the Mythic Realm
I don’t mean to imply that baby Jesus weeps if you don’t clean your room/clear your plate/pay your bills.
Nor do I mean to suggest that the Mandate of Heaven is withdrawn from households where there are dirty dishes in the sink.
Is it better to say, “A messy house leads to a messy life”, or that “Bad karma will accrue to a person with a messy house”? Certainly, if my house is messy, I tend to lose or misplace bills, student homework, equipment, tools, and other urgent materials. If my house is clean, I have a much easier time with it, saving myself stress and dram and worry. I do think it’s interesting that I cleaned my house, and made a ‘wish list’ of things I wanted and needed in my life, in the same week, and that several important requests that I made in the wish list were immediately achieved. It was a little weird, but also positive. Coincidental? Perhaps. I’ll keep cleaning up and cleaning out, and see if I can achieve equally spectacular results.
Moreover, I’m not trying to invent Catholic guilt in a pagan/new age framework, so much as to get people to think about junk in their lives as being a genuine inhibitor which prevents them from having a life which is closer to what they want.
However, your point about the differential between use of myths, and making changes based on social utility is well-founded. I may have to think more on this, and develop some new ways of thinking about organization, both for myself and people who read me.
Now, I don’t think of myself as a flake, although flakiness certainly enters into some of what I do. And most people don’t think of themselves as flakes, even if they are to the rest of us.
So I’ve decided to compile a set of maxims or aphorisms about getting rid of junk that may appeal to the pronoiac, New-Age navel-gazer in your life, who may very well be you:
You are working cleverness. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but, are you merely rebranding Babylon into your own milieu, importing critical concepts — not responsibility or work ethic, but utilitarian manipulation, purposeful deception, and compromise of fundamental issues to serve the needs of the immediately trivial.
I am an open advocate of something not unrelated to Plato’s Republic, so I can hardly argue with the manipulation of mythology to serve other ends, but Plato advocates manipulating the body of national myth to shape and protect the polis. Is your regard for all these beliefs so trivial that you will subject them to transformation into a bullet list of mental tricks to turn them into reminders to organize your house?
I do not speak out of regard for mythology, but out of regard for you and the content of your thoughts. When you confute these things with the everyday, you make them little and puny, bent and crooked from justifying this and that. Doing it to another person is, in a Christian context, basically saying, with sincerity, that they make the baby jesus cry if they don’t clean their plate.
There are good everyday answers to the need to do this — if you do not clean up, your abode will be messy, impossible to find your things, attractive to vermin, and so on. If you do not do it, it is because you are lazy or overly tired. As the dweller in that abode, you can be comfortable with that or not.
Reinventing catholic guilt and orthopraxy to serve the needs of your personal situation seems to me to accept fundamental moral compromise on a personal and social level for a trivial incentive.
Socially, I am obviously not very protective of counterculture flakes — they irritate me to no end. But, if our culture is to experience renewal, then they must be in some part responsible, because the freak nation is our culture’s standing force for social revision.
Why do these flaky people lack these basic skills of organization and cleanliness? Are they busy working counterculture jobs? Are they the product of a poor upbringing? Are they making a conscious choice? Will laying a guilt trip on them be an effective approach?
I would say that you are better off as a shaper of cultures to make an arguement for these things on the grounds of pure social utility and invent mimetic technologies that make them easy to remember and easy to do, and preserving the shape of the underlying form for the purpose of defining cultural context and social contract.
Now, I don’t think of myself as a flake, although flakiness certainly enters into some of what I do. And most people don’t think of themselves as flakes, even if they are to the rest of us.
So I’ve decided to compile a set of maxims or aphorisms about getting rid of junk that may appeal to the pronoiac, New-Age navel-gazer in your life, who may very well be you:
You are working cleverness. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but, are you merely rebranding Babylon into your own milieu, importing critical concepts — not responsibility or work ethic, but utilitarian manipulation, purposeful deception, and compromise of fundamental issues to serve the needs of the immediately trivial.
I am an open advocate of something not unrelated to Plato’s Republic, so I can hardly argue with the manipulation of mythology to serve other ends, but Plato advocates manipulating the body of national myth to shape and protect the polis. Is your regard for all these beliefs so trivial that you will subject them to transformation into a bullet list of mental tricks to turn them into reminders to organize your house?
I do not speak out of regard for mythology, but out of regard for you and the content of your thoughts. When you confute these things with the everyday, you make them little and puny, bent and crooked from justifying this and that. Doing it to another person is, in a Christian context, basically saying, with sincerity, that they make the baby jesus cry if they don’t clean their plate.
There are good everyday answers to the need to do this — if you do not clean up, your abode will be messy, impossible to find your things, attractive to vermin, and so on. If you do not do it, it is because you are lazy or overly tired. As the dweller in that abode, you can be comfortable with that or not.
Reinventing catholic guilt and orthopraxy to serve the needs of your personal situation seems to me to accept fundamental moral compromise on a personal and social level for a trivial incentive.
Socially, I am obviously not very protective of counterculture flakes — they irritate me to no end. But, if our culture is to experience renewal, then they must be in some part responsible, because the freak nation is our culture’s standing force for social revision.
Why do these flaky people lack these basic skills of organization and cleanliness? Are they busy working counterculture jobs? Are they the product of a poor upbringing? Are they making a conscious choice? Will laying a guilt trip on them be an effective approach?
I would say that you are better off as a shaper of cultures to make an arguement for these things on the grounds of pure social utility and invent mimetic technologies that make them easy to remember and easy to do, and preserving the shape of the underlying form for the purpose of defining cultural context and social contract.
Everyday Answers and the Mythic Realm
I don’t mean to imply that baby Jesus weeps if you don’t clean your room/clear your plate/pay your bills.
Nor do I mean to suggest that the Mandate of Heaven is withdrawn from households where there are dirty dishes in the sink.
Is it better to say, “A messy house leads to a messy life”, or that “Bad karma will accrue to a person with a messy house”? Certainly, if my house is messy, I tend to lose or misplace bills, student homework, equipment, tools, and other urgent materials. If my house is clean, I have a much easier time with it, saving myself stress and dram and worry. I do think it’s interesting that I cleaned my house, and made a ‘wish list’ of things I wanted and needed in my life, in the same week, and that several important requests that I made in the wish list were immediately achieved. It was a little weird, but also positive. Coincidental? Perhaps. I’ll keep cleaning up and cleaning out, and see if I can achieve equally spectacular results.
Moreover, I’m not trying to invent Catholic guilt in a pagan/new age framework, so much as to get people to think about junk in their lives as being a genuine inhibitor which prevents them from having a life which is closer to what they want.
However, your point about the differential between use of myths, and making changes based on social utility is well-founded. I may have to think more on this, and develop some new ways of thinking about organization, both for myself and people who read me.
Re: No, no free maid/pro organizer service
damn… no friends and I take all weekends trying to clean and declutter….. just have 4 other people cluttering behind me….
I need one of those reality teams.
Honestly my asthma keeps me from claning more than 2 hours a day.
I really need to win money and hire people…..
I like that!
I really like, “you can’t impose your Will on reality, if you can’t impose your will on your real mess.”
No, no free maid/pro organizer service
No, there’s no free maid service, but there is quite a lot of good advice.
Set yourself a two-hour block of time, and one room. Invite a friend over for some take-out chinese and some wine, and get it done.
“4. Your stuff is clogging the free radicals in the ionosphere.”
Your stuff is polluting the noosphere.
“20. Western dragons are evil and lie around on heaps of treasure; Eastern dragons are good and dance and play everywhere in heaven and earth.”
Western dragons have only 3 things in their lairs: Themselves, treasure, and stuff about to become food or treasure. If the horde is a little sloppy, they make up for it with their focus. Plus, giant clawed hand/feet, little tiny gold coins — they get a bit of slack.
Here’s my suggestion: You can’t impose your Will on Reality, if you can’t impose your Will on your Real Mess.
later
tom
“4. Your stuff is clogging the free radicals in the ionosphere.”
Your stuff is polluting the noosphere.
“20. Western dragons are evil and lie around on heaps of treasure; Eastern dragons are good and dance and play everywhere in heaven and earth.”
Western dragons have only 3 things in their lairs: Themselves, treasure, and stuff about to become food or treasure. If the horde is a little sloppy, they make up for it with their focus. Plus, giant clawed hand/feet, little tiny gold coins — they get a bit of slack.
Here’s my suggestion: You can’t impose your Will on Reality, if you can’t impose your Will on your Real Mess.
later
tom
I like that!
I really like, “you can’t impose your Will on reality, if you can’t impose your will on your real mess.”
does this advice come with free maid / pro organizer servive for the got to much on thier plate to keep up with 5 people, people on your friends list…. ha ha ha
I keep trying to get the obsesive compulsive at work to come have a holiday at my house over the weekend, but it doesn;t work.
does this advice come with free maid / pro organizer servive for the got to much on thier plate to keep up with 5 people, people on your friends list…. ha ha ha
I keep trying to get the obsesive compulsive at work to come have a holiday at my house over the weekend, but it doesn;t work.
No, no free maid/pro organizer service
No, there’s no free maid service, but there is quite a lot of good advice.
Set yourself a two-hour block of time, and one room. Invite a friend over for some take-out chinese and some wine, and get it done.
Re: No, no free maid/pro organizer service
damn… no friends and I take all weekends trying to clean and declutter….. just have 4 other people cluttering behind me….
I need one of those reality teams.
Honestly my asthma keeps me from claning more than 2 hours a day.
I really need to win money and hire people…..
It’s almost Thursday…
Forty minutes or so until Thursday.
And then it’s only 24 hours and a work-day until you have a weekend.
Can I offer a few more bits of advice?
1. Pick a room. Any room. Tear that ship apart until you’ve found those plans, and bring the passengers — you want them alive. Making one room liveable will create huge benefits that you’ll want to expand to other rooms thoroughly. Jumping room-to-room just straightens the clutter, rather than disposing of it.
2. Have a sense of what you want the room to look like when you’re done, and set yourself some intermediate goals. “We’ll have lunch when I get to the bookshelf.”
3. Use the bagua chart, and apply it to the room you’re currently working on. Start in the corner that seems most obvious, given what you feel you have to work out in the rest of your life.
15. Burning incense or sage isn’t going to clear your space as quick as throwing shit away.
This is my favorite.
I’ve been itching to clean my room since your first post in this set. How many days until the weekend?
15. Burning incense or sage isn’t going to clear your space as quick as throwing shit away.
This is my favorite.
I’ve been itching to clean my room since your first post in this set. How many days until the weekend?
It’s almost Thursday…
Forty minutes or so until Thursday.
And then it’s only 24 hours and a work-day until you have a weekend.
Can I offer a few more bits of advice?
1. Pick a room. Any room. Tear that ship apart until you’ve found those plans, and bring the passengers — you want them alive. Making one room liveable will create huge benefits that you’ll want to expand to other rooms thoroughly. Jumping room-to-room just straightens the clutter, rather than disposing of it.
2. Have a sense of what you want the room to look like when you’re done, and set yourself some intermediate goals. “We’ll have lunch when I get to the bookshelf.”
3. Use the bagua chart, and apply it to the room you’re currently working on. Start in the corner that seems most obvious, given what you feel you have to work out in the rest of your life.