Believe me, this is not the conditions I had hoped to start my journey under. The whole reason I wanted to become a professional organizer was to help people take control of their physical and emotional world. To help others create strategies in their lives to allow for predictability, order, efficiency and a sense of empowerment over their day to day activities. How on earth can we find order, efficiency and a sense of control in these times?
At the beginning of the year as I was mentally setting out my goals for 2020, creating a vision board and coming up with a list of ‘to-do’s for myself, I read an enlightening book that talked about living life with more uncertainty. WHAT?? For someone like me, that was a fairly foreign concept. As a planner by nature, a worrier and someone who always wants to see what’s coming up ahead, this seemed like a ridiculous goal for myself. To live with more uncertainty….that goes against everything I’ve always strived for.
But the further I learned about this concept, the more I realized I needed to give it a try. The main idea I took from this book is that living with more uncertainty means to trust that things will turn out the way they should. To let go of some of the preconceived notions you have of how life should unfold, and what you think you know about others. In essence, it involves assuming that you really have no idea what’s up ahead and take every situation as a learning experience not to be clouded by previous experience that might lead you to feel certain ways.
When I decided to give this notion a try, never did I think we’d all be dropped into a situation that completely embodied this concept. During this pandemic, we are all living with a lot of uncertainty right now. But what I’m trying to do, while we navigate these difficult times, is to accept this and do what I can to keep moving forward. Living and accepting a life with uncertainty does not mean stand still.
As for many of us these days, my focus has shifted greatly in the past few months. As I see now, for most of my life, my need and desire to be organized, came from a place of fear. I felt an extreme need to be in control of everything and being organized – I thought – gave me this control, this power. If I had control of my life, the unexpected would not knock me down.
The person I am will always be someone who enjoys routine, a schedule and list after list. But what I’ve been trying to move towards, is to realize that we can never have complete control over our lives. And striving for organization should come from a different place than fear- the end result should be efficiency, not control.
And the reason we should chase efficiency is to allow us to have balance and down time in our lives. For many years, the more organized I got, the more I added to my schedule. I was afraid of down time. Quiet time to be felt like laziness or incompetence. In light of the current world situation, I am, like a lot of people, enjoying the slowed down version of the world. And while I feel that schedules and task lists are still a crucial part of our lives, the outcome should be to allow us to embrace more down time, more family time, more time for introspection, more time to just ‘be’. Chase this sacred time, rather than chasing control.
As we start to embrace this new world – one that I actually hope stays with us in certain ways – I encourage you to seek efficiency for the sake of balance, personal time, family time and time for just ‘being’ in the world. That, for me, is my new purpose and I am looking forward to using my organizational skills to help others achieve this as well.