Dialectics: Organization and Clutter

I'll admit it. I'm kind of a neat freak-sometimes. But this craving to keep things tidy and organized does not just come from no where. There must be some sort of push, a type of factor, to make me want to be organized. That is why I would say that organization and clutter go hand in hand.

Take my room as an example. Yes, it's not always clean. Honestly, it's usually not clean. Either it's my desk that begins to pile up with books and worksheets or it's my closet where clothes begin to get off the hangers and go into heaps on the ground. Clutter is inevitable. I don't think I've ever met someone or been to anyone's house where their room is always clean. It's just not realistic. Things get put off to the side and many of us decide not to find time in our busy lives to take the time and organize/clean the messes we've created.

So, mess is inevitable. But completely solvable. That is why I see a connection between these two opposites. They depend on each other. Without a mess, there wouldn't be an organization process, and without organization, there wouldn't be messes. For example, if I never witnessed my room going from an organized to a cluttered state, I would never take the time to say "Hey, I think that I should clean my room" or "I think I'm going to go through the things on my desk and organize it". It just wouldn't happen. You need to have a mess to let you realize and push you to cleaning it up. And flipping that the other way, without actually organizing your things and creating a clean environment, 'messes' wouldn't exist. We just wouldn't associate it that way.

Therefore, I'd like to think that people can't just be "neat" all the time or "messy" all the time. Being on either of those spectrums had to result from a push from being on the opposite side of the spectrum. Someone who has an extremely neat room usually entails that they had presided over a messy room, which pushed them to organize and make it neat. Conversely, someone who has a messy room probably had presided over a considerably neat room, and thus managed to fall over to the complete opposite.

All in all, my point is that you can't have organization without having clutter. Neither of those terms would exist if the other did not. We would just have some sort of medium, another term, to describe the level of organization. We would not have extremes, using my thinking, because they depend on each other.

So next time you think of labeling someone as a "neat freak" or a "slob" just remember that they probably became that way from presiding in an atmosphere the complete opposite.