Content with the clutter
I’m fairly certain our versions of “relaxed” differ. On a daily basis I sift through paper: in the kitchen, on my desk, on the windowsill, piled on the floor by my bed. Yet when I sort the piles I can’t find anything again. This was an enduring mystery until a friend sent me Malcolm Gladwell’s 2002 New Yorker article about paper. “Piles are living, breathing archives,” he writes. We are constantly problem solving and making new associations; the spatial arrangement of our paper mirrors the way we think. Freedman’s book takes this further, arguing that neatness impedes creativity. “Just as there are benefits to being organized,” he tells me, “I’ve never found a profession that couldn’t benefit from a certain amount of messiness and randomness.”
When I arrive at the Toronto home of Maryann Kerr, a 47-year-old professional fundraiser, she’s helping her two daughters get out the door. Her husband, who stays home with the girls, sings rockabilly songs as he packs lunches. One daughter shouts that she needs her agenda signed. The family dog drops to the floor with a satisfied grunt and gnaws a biscuit. Kerr emanates amused calm and hands me a cup of tea. “Welcome to chaos.”
If there is beauty in the randomness and improvisation Freedman describes, it is here. Crafts, collections and detritus of child rearing line every room. The books and precious objects speak to a family with many interests: This is the house where her husband grew up, an unspoiled 1963 artifact with vintage wallpaper and a bona fide bomb shelter.
Clutter creeps back, but everyone's happier
Kerr tells me their routine used to be more structured, but they’ve let go a little. “What I remember growing up is that having a clean house was one of my mother’s priorities,” she says, “and she worked and had five kids. She spent every spare minute scrubbing, and you know what? She was always in a bad mood.”
“When you walk into someone else’s house and see stuff around, it says something about who they are,” says Freedman when I describe Kerr’s home to him the next day. “It’s a form of communication. If you walk into a house with very little stuff in it, what do you know about them? You know one thing: They’re neat.”
I imagine the imperfect stories our own home tells: the pencilled notes my daughter leaves for me; the Quebec scene painted by my partner’s grandmother; the lamp we rescued from the curbside; the Boggle score pads between couch cushions. Part of the idea being sold in the magazines piled on our coffee table is that successful people don’t clutter, that minimal equals beautiful. But now, when I really look at them, these rooms seem too empty to me. We fail to see the loveliness of the stories our homes tell — the same way we fail to see the beauty of our bodies, zeroing in instead on our perceived flaws. And although I still long to be tidy, I prefer, always, to see evidence of a life joyfully lived.
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This article originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of More
