This is my first post(or blog) and as a person who had, as a little analogy with blogs, I hope to follow, no rules at all, if there are any. That is the beauty of messiness. Of course, as a non-native English speaker, who had been injected with three to four languages from the childhood,( one for myself- Malayalam, one for my country- Hindi, one for my career- English, and last for entertainment- Tamil films) I do intend to follow no rules of any particular language.
This post is written from the inspiration from Weinberger's book, "Everything is miscellaneous". It gives an insight into the cleaning behavior hidden in us. That includes the art of classifying everything around us and keeping everything in the exact place, intended for it.
One look into my room and you will find the messiness in me. But I don't like to keep my room dirty. Wait a minute, not keeping things in its exact position, does not mean it is dirty. It is me who decide where things are to be. It is my room. So how dare you classify my room as messy. The normally accepted notion of cleanliness could be your answer. But it is not written anywhere, nor it is constant and varies with person's perspectives. Which is the ideal place to keep my mobile phone in my room? So I totally discard the notion of the publicly accepted notion. The other concept of messiness could be the ease of findability. I don't find any difficulty to find my stuff from my messy room, or I find it equally difficult to find a thing from my messy room and tidy room. So the point is, my room is not tidy or messy. But as all my fellow flatmates, I forget all the above arguments, on one day of every month. The day of room inspection, done by my hostel warden. I clean my room in commonly accepted notion of cleanliness, to avoid the penalty.
From my childhood, I love to clean my room. I keep my thing in an arranged manner following the beauty of symmetry and rules of classification. Yes, I love to do it, but still, the art of messiness is so inbuilt in me that, I do it seldom rarely. Or it could be because, I want to have the change in untidiness to tidiness to be maximum, so I may be unknowingly making my room untidy, deliberately. Whatever may be the reason, from the day I clean my room to the day I clean again, I am consistently making my room messy.
Yes, like me, the art of messiness is hidden in you too and we are following it. You just need to realize it, and appreciate it.It may not be confined to your room alone, it could be on your computer desktop, in your cloth cupboard, plate racks or in your office cubicle. We are born in a messy world, where nothing is in order and nothing is arranged or classified. Consider the sociology of fruits and vegetables. Both the fruit and vegetables are the evolutionary technique developed by trees to attract animals like monkeys, humans, birds, to eat the juicy substance and drop or excrete the seeds hidden in it to a place far from the main tree. But the fact is that nature does not classify fruit from vegetables, it is just the evolution of the trees to attract the desired animal to have their bait. It is we, who are arranging and classifying things around us.
I am not arguing for the invalidity of the notion of arranging or classifying things, but just want to make the point that, we are all born with perfect messiness and keeping my room untidy is accordance with the laws of nature.
