Messiness is a virtue and acceptance soothes the soul

One of my best friends had this little sign up in her kitchen: This mess is a place. Brillant! I love that. I totally embrace that sentiment.

Life is messy. Always. If you accept that premise, your day-to-day struggle isn’t as tough as it is for people who insist that everything be linear, neat and tidy.

I remember watching Julia Child on her show. Flour went everywhere. Boiling-over pots, spattering skillets and slopping measuring cups contributed to the mess on her counters and stove. She was unconcerned. She may have been the chef that first uttered the words “Never trust a neat cook.” I loved that T-shirt. She cautioned viewers that interrupting your cooking to clean will negatively impact the result you are after.

Basically, her message was if your priority is the neatness of your kitchen over the culinary creation you’re slaving over, disappointing results shouldn’t be a surprise. Yup. My grandmother and sister Kay were meticulously neat. Their kitchens sparkled. But meals produced by their hands were lackluster.

Mom, notoriously messy, created scrumptious delights. Her casseroles and pies were memorialized in her eulogy. Of course, Julia had a whole crew of people to clean up after her.  So, maybe have a sponge handy to sop up the goo on the stove so it doesn’t burn into a lacquer. Just saying.

Another point to consider. According to several studies, messiness is a sign of creativity. Research focusing on the desks of people found that a predominance of messy desk surfaces related to a high level of creativity in the people seated at those desks. Conversely, a neat desk indicated a more analytical and disciplined mind in its owner. Productivity was seemingly unrelated to the neatness or messiness of one’s desk, contrary to some researchers’ hypotheses.

When I’m challenged with “how can you find anything in that mess,” I respond by going directly to what I’m looking for. I think the creative mind accepts that the world is like a tangle of yarn. We develop our own “filing” system within that tangle. Some of that, I suspect, is a “photographic memory,” along with a heightened ability for recall. Something I’ve relied on since I was a kid. An alphabetically organized string laid out in a straight line doesn’t confound us, either, as we can do both. The artistic mind is generally very versatile and agile.

This flexibility allows most “messy” people to navigate their world with less stress and cortisol generation than the typical neat freak. Our minds can process lots of information while we multi-task what’s on our plates. Organization for creative folks is a multi-plane concept, like 3D chess (you Trekkies will get that reference).

Where a jumbled mess may confound an analytical person, the creative brain folds it into their convoluted palate, processing it along with the other yarns intersecting with it.  Eventually, it all gets sorted out and put together in a cohesiveness we understand. Sometimes a masterpiece emerges from those tangled bits. And we move on to the next challenge(s).

“Life beats down and crushes the soul. And art reminds you that you have one.” — Stella Adler.