Quick Hit: Making Arrangements
Our everyday spaces shout loudly about who we are — if we stop and notice what we’re looking for.
IN PASSING … I wrote in this space a few weeks ago about whether we do violence in some small way when we disassemble our loved ones’ lives after they die. It got me to thinking about the ways that people label and organize everyday stuff, and the role that curation — self-curation, really — plays in our lives.
We tend to overlook how much of a person’s personality can be contained in the way that they arrange their desks, their drawers, their closets, their garages, their nonpublic physical lives. This is of course why archivists, curating the papers of the famous and the noteworthy, pay attention not only to the actual stuff they have but the manner and order in which the person kept them. It is content and context and, ultimately, a clue to identity.
So I challenge you to take a look around your own living or working space and consider: What about it is incontrovertibly, unmistakably YOU? I don’t mean the pictures you have on the wall or the tchotchkes on the windowsill — the things on display that are designed to be looked at. I mean the way you arrange the everyday things that are designed for efficiency and usefulness, not aesthetics.
How is your silverware drawer laid out? Do you alphabetize your spices? Where does the mail go when you bring it in? Are your shoes arranged by season, by level of formality or by use case (or not at all)? Where do you keep your takeout menus? How is the desktop on your computer organized? What do these everyday things say about YOU and how you think and organize the world?
This entire project, “Unsorted but Significant,” was inspired by a single file-folder sticker that my label-loving late father wrote upon many years ago and stuck on a box in his closet that I found while going through his stuff. This week I came across another label from a file folder. This one he coined MINOR MEMORABILIA, which I find to be almost a — what? — “micropoem,” I suppose. Two typed words, but in them I can hear and feel, so intensely, who he was.
Do you have examples of how you arrange everyday things in ways unique to you? I’d love to hear about them. No example is too quirky or too small! The motto here is, and always will be, “Everything is interesting.”
Piles! Stacks! As I type this at our dining table aka my desk...a pile of 4 unread FTs; another pile with last weekend's FT, a stack of magazines and assorted paper. Then there's the pile on a dining chair (which I have to move for friends' arrival for dinner tomorrow.) We work and live in a one bedroom apartment, so it is a daily/hourly battle to keep things tidy and uncluttered. My generous husband calls this the sign of a creative soul...
This has me looking anew at what's arrayed around my desk and what's idling on my nightstand, and questioning both what these items say about me and how I might use these spaces to remind myself who I am. That's a gift I've gotten from reading this.