IN TIMES of crisis, I like to sort.
Sorting, decluttering, organising – call it what you will, but way before Marie Kondo started making money from being a ‘tidying expert’, I was one.
(In terms of life’s great ‘missed-the-boat’ moments, that one is definitely on my list. I was mindfully discarding and joyfully list-making long before KonMari was a thing. Dammit.)
This has always been my way of coping when stressed. You would have been hard pushed to find a more organised cupboard than the one belonging to me, aged 12, coping with the sudden loss of my dad: top shelf for jigsaws, old Bunty annuals and cassettes, bottom shelf cunningly redesigned for my typewriter, with notebooks and pens to the side.
Years ago, on particularly challenging days at work, my features editor would often find me reorganising the stationery cupboard on my lunchbreak.
“You like to sort things to clear your head, don’t you?” she remarked, astutely. One colleague even offered to pay me to make her desk as tidy as mine. (In the end I stayed behind after work one night with an equally tidy-minded colleague, and we did it for free. Because, you know, it was fun. Psychologists would have a field day with me.)
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For reasons I need not spell out, I am currently super-sorting the house from top to bottom. Kitchen drawers, paperwork files, children’s bookshelves…you name it, it’s getting dragged out, dusted and neatly replaced.
It’s not difficult to understand why. Just as many women obsessively clean their homes in the last few weeks of pregnancy (I loved the nesting phase, unsurprisingly), ordering and tidying in times of stress is instinctive, and all to do with control.
Becoming a parent is a step into the unknown, so if we can take matters into our own hands, we feel calmer.
The same is true of other times in our lives, when the rug is being pulled from under us. Psychologist Sherrie Campbell, author of Success Equations: A Path to Living an Emotionally Wealthy Life, says she commonly sees people redecorating after rough patches.
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“When we’re in transition or in crisis mode, a rearranged space can feel like a rearranged life,” she points out.
All of our lives have been rearranged at the moment and it’s hard to see how things will improve any time soon. I don’t know about you, but if I have to stay at home for the foreseeable future, it’s going to be with a sensibly-organised fridge and a colour-coded bookcase.
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