There’s a pile of clothes sitting by my bed. It’s been there for a week, and chances are that heap of shame will build up for another three days. Stained T-shirts, moldy work-out outfits, ugh….
I could solve the problem by sorting out the mess now, yet by the time I’m done with laundry, the kitchen’s sink will be full of saucy frying pans and floating crumbs. Again.
Cleaning the apartment is an endless task, everything is at least 30% messy, if not downright disgusting.
And the same goes for my unfinished task lists, abandonned novels and broken promises.
What was the last time you felt totally satisfied with a project?
Personally, I can’t remember…Everything I did was a bitter-sweet mixture of random achievements and failures, there’s always been a mismatch between how I wanted my life to be and what it looked like.
And it turned out to be a pretty good thing.
“Life is what happens while you have other projects”
Said a famous guy whose messy life ended abruptly with seven wound shots.
He was right, not only life throws at us whatever it pleases, but this often results in a deep overhaul of our value system.
One of my best friends was once my worst enemy, it took 5 years working with him to tolerate his differences and to regard them as the qualities I lacked: he’s patient when I’m not, tenacious when I slack off and detail-oriented when I’m sloppy.
Spending time with him felt like a goddamn boot camp: he reflected my shortcomings perfectly every day, and he also taught me that to him, my nastiest tendencies were also the qualities he so badly needed…depending on circumstances.
Is your current partner the one you had planned ten years ago? What about your friends?
I bet you hadn’t pictured them on your life project, did you?
Do I push it too far if I say that our loved ones made us progress by NOT being what we wanted them to be?
I guess that’s what I have in my mind when I praise our mess, since what we label chaos is probably nothing else than what we need to grow: the fertilizer, and the magic too.
I don’t intend to patronize you about what outlook you should have on your life, you have your own personal mess to take care of and I don’t know what it contains, but rest assured that to my eyes, what you’re uncomfortable with might be what makes you unique and interesting.
Picture by 22Kartika (Own work) Creative Common License via Wikimedia Commons