Order

 

 

I HAVE A SLIGHT OBSESSION WITH ORDER.

I realize this as I go to add a contact into my Gmail contacts list and I have now spent probably an hour trying to merge contacts, delete contacts, fill in blanks for contacts, etc......  and I have yet to put in the new contact....my original mission. I don't like blanks. If I have an excel spreadsheet I'm creating at work, I need information in all of the fields. If there are a bunch of holes, your eyes don't flow through the rows and columns smoothly (well, my eyes at least.)



See, your eyes stop on the one turned the wrong way. Your eyes don't naturally flow down the stack.

I know I get more like this depending on whats going on in my life. There are moments when I don't have time for obsessing and then moments when I don't care what else I get done because it will feel great to get this one thing in order.

The word "order", in this sense, could be equally exchanged with the word "control." Sometimes bringing order to something that seems out of control brings a small peace to life. Even something as simple as my contacts list....which by the way, I didn't feel like it was out of order before I looked today...I didn't care that there were tons of double contacts and blanks for names and old emails....I didn't even know it was like that. So it wasn't bothering me. I wasn't obsessing over it..."I really need to get my contacts list organized soon!" Nope. But when I saw some things that bugged me and started making some changes, I realized that it WAS something I could bring order to and a project I could COMPLETE.

That's why I mention what's going on in the rest of our lives. I have MANY, MANY things out of order in my life currently. (That's a whole 'nother blog post.) I have MANY things I can't control. (That's a whole 'nother blog post.) I can't delete, merge, fill in the blanks and add to my life until it looks ordered in an hour today. I can't control the details because many things are outside of my control. BUT for a couple hours in one day I can gain order in an irrelevant place that I wasn't planning on focusing....and you know what?...That's ok. There are fair worse things I could obsess about.

You would think that my house would be perfectly clean, straight, organized and wonderful. But it's not. As I mentioned, there's not time to obsess about everything and I understand that. It depends what bugs me at what moment....and I should add, creativity and design scream order to me at times. For instance, check out the picture below. These book shelves are not in order. But they are organized by color and sorted in a way that is asthetically appealing to me and therefore speaks order to me.



Anyway, I'm going to go add that contact to my list now. And then when I'm done making my changes, I will sit back and look at this beautiful;y ordered list with practically no blanks or doubles and breathe a nice sigh of satisfaction. (I know...I'm weird.)