Big Thoughts

I broke the lens on my phone camera moving furniture around my flat. There’s no memory of it happening, just an afternoon lugging boxes of books into the afternoon and the realisation that the lens was shattered. My first two attempts to fix it resulted in failure, the repair places shrugging their shoulders and telling me they didn’t have the parts. After that, I placed tape over the broken lens and made do until I had the chance to get it repaired for good.

The camera will still take photos, but they aren’t crisp and the colours are all washed out. The kind of photos that are no longer suitable for scanning documents with the phone, or photographing receipts that are uploaded to a rebate app. The kind of problems that are annoying enough that you notice when they come up, but aren’t quite regular enough to justify the time and the money it takes to resolve them when they’re not present.

I keep using my phone, sans camera. I keep on getting by. Once a week I pull my phone out, thinking to take a photograph, and get that little reminder that I’m letting this thing slide. Then I feel that little pang of disappointment that the repairs are not yet done.

I’m noticing it more and more this week, as I sit down to write something for the blog each morning. Reaching back to the old habit of adding a photographs to each post, developing the discipline to reach out and observe the world around me without the pressure of making it perfect. A task that served a purpose beyond just taking a photograph, looking for an image to append to a post.

It creeps up on you, the pressure. That moment when you find yourself slipping below an unspoken line, shifting a task from “achievable” to “I no longer have the tools.”

So, I pick up my phone with its broken camera. I make do for another day, doing what I can with the tools I have instead of focusing on what might be.

We rearranged our apartment two weeks ago, slotting furniture into new configurations and making more space for my partners stuff. Then, I got sick with a head cold, and my partner inherited the cold from me, so the job remains 80% done instead of getting everything tucked away and finalised. My desk, which was one of the few pieces of furniture not moving during the process, has played host to a small pile of things set aside as part of that final 20%, which I’ve largely been ignoring for the last seven days as I worked from the couch.

It’s all too easy to find reasons to work from the couch, instead of addressing the problem. To work with the state of the desk as it is, and look for a quick solution. It’s not that the mess is hard to clear, but that clearing it means I may need to consider the questions that come after the space is work-ready.

The advantage of a big, physical mess is the way it provides space to consider less-visible, procedural messes that get in the way of using a space effectively: I haven’t downloaded the virtual drive onto the desktop PC at the present; I’ve started using a bunch of tools on the laptop that aren’t compatible with the desktop PC; shifts in focus and daily attention that no longer sync with existing long-term goals, and projects that have been set aside without thinking about the implications.

My mess isn’t a sign of a project failing; it’s an invitation to reset, re-evaluate, and start doing things better.