Three Million Moments

God bless your mess

March 8th, 2007

Chaos, disorder, your own personal little mess. Once the evil devices of Satan, today Columbia University professor Eric Abrahamson and co-author David H. Freeman are bringing you some Good News. In A Perfect Mess, the authors maintain that a little mess is actually a good thing, and a lot of order is a bad thing. Chris Norris interviewed Abrahamson in Mess Up Your Life in a recent New York Magazine devoted to understanding Inner Peace from a New Yorker’s perspective.

The idea is not that we should all be extremely messy, but that there is such a thing as “optimally messy”. This is a huge relief for all of us who have already abandoned the idea that we can ever have everything perfectly in order in the first place. These authors are validating what we already experience everyday. That despite our streamlined, IKEA clad homes and the advent of master organizers like the Container Store, we are learning to accept things being a little out of place.

You might even say (in the spirit of Wabi-Sabi design) a little imperfection may be the future of perfection. And that value of absolute order is evolving to embrace the natural balance of chaos and order in our lives, rather than fighting it.

Much of the structure we have today is simply legacy from a time when we desired a perfectly ordered construct (think 1950’s). The idea that things can and should be orderly. How long has it taken for the media industry to take citizen journalism via blog, vlogs and wikis seriously? On the surface, the mess of all those opinions fly in the face of the tradition of journalism. And the blogosphere of content may may appear to be unnecessary, undesireable chaos. But the culture has voted as seen by the vanishing newspaper, rejecting traditional formulas and single voice of authority. The culture is hungry to discover prescious knowledge and insight from that mess.

Perhaps living with a bit of mess means living with the idea that we don’t know everything, we don’t know what the ultimate order is or should be, and that we can appreciate the process and spontaneous creative benefit from our messes, whatever our messes might be.

Entry Filed under: Future of Good