My desk is a disaster zone at the moment. A jagged landscape of poorly stacked notebooks, contracts, and opened mail, with the detritus of my BWF office placed over the top. I love working at my desktop, but I can’t fathom the notion of sitting down and writing there.
Our kitchen is a disaster zone at the moment, too. So is our bathroom, our living room, and my car. Our bedroom is relatively well-composed, although I’m behind on cleaning the CPAP machine and that’s taking a toll on my sleep.
Other disasters: my writing process, my publishing timeline, my PhD deadlines, my planning systems. Invisible chaos that’s largely unnoticeable unless you’re inside my head and trying to wade through the detritus in order to get things done.
The great temptation of chaos is this: nothing is fixable unless everything is flexible, and if you let things slide long enough, the very notion of getting ‘caught up’ is the stuff of nightmares and wry laughter. So you sink into the chaos, doing nothing.
There’s a logic to it: if I don’t wash the dishes, I don’t have to solve the problems with my PhD thesis. I don’t have to email the authors whose books weren’t getting released because BWF ate all my available spoons and threw off all my plans.
I don’t have to deal with the really complicated feelings I have around leaving the Festival, even though it was the right thing to do, or my fear around what happens next.
Of course, I’ve been here before, and I’ve got some pretty well-worn habits that kick in when chaos descends. First and foremost, I reach for Dan Charnas’ Everything In Its Place, and revisiting one of its very first lessons.
On his way to work, LiPuma saw commuters dashing for the subway—flustered, sweating, stumbling—and the next day he’d see those same commuters rushing again. After working in the kitchen, LiPuma couldn’t understand what was wrong with these people. Why not get up a half-hour earlier? Wasn’t greeting your day better than fighting it? Why not make your kid’s lunch the night before, lay out your clothes, do anything you need to do so you can get up and not run around like a maniac so you can smile and enjoy your day? That was, after all, what LiPuma was beginning to do in the kitchen. Stress and chaos were a normal part of his job. But if he could control a little bit of that chaos—preparing for what he knew was going to happen—he could greet chaos, embrace it. His mastery of the expected would enable him to better deal with the unexpected. You plan what you can so you can deal with what you can’t.
Time to take a deep breathe and go back to first principles: Greet the day. Plan first, then arrange my spaces so they’re usable again. Clean as I go and focus on the next action, rather than extrapolating forward to the point of chaos and failure.
I’m not a chef, but any writer knows that stress and chaos is a huge part of the job. You can’t control it, so your main job’s getting back to a space where you roll with the punches a little better.
