Perfection is a Second Rate Idea
A poem arrived in my inbox last week, I get the Poem-a-Day email from the Poetry Foundation, and I think you’ll enjoy it:
The Heat of Autumn, Jane Hirshfield
The heat of autumn
is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
One is a dock you walk out on,
the other the spine of a thin swimming horse
and the river each day a full measure colder.
A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.
Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,
rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser
by color. That’s autumn heat:
her hand placing silver buckles with silver,
gold buckles with gold, setting each
on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,
and calling it pleasure.
The sweater of a man who loves you. What an intoxicating item.
Poetry and stories reach us and speak to our inner life often more deeply than clinical psychotherapy descriptions. That’s why I love them and that’s their usefulness. To me, this poem speaks to the deep pain of heartbreak and letting go. All of our items eventually turn into hourglasses. We purchase them or receive them, and they are useful and joyful for a while, but then something happens. Our lover leaves, we gain a little weight, we grow up and out of them in some way. At that moment, the clock starts. Their usefulness and aliveness is limited. And one day, they expire. In this poem, that moment happens. He decides to leave her, and his sweaters start to tick down until the moment she is ready to let them go.
So many of us have felt this, but don’t have a game plan for the final step when it’s time to haul these dead items out of our homes and make room for new life-giving ones. That’s where I come in.
When people first find out that I organize for a living, I sometimes catch a flash of assumption on their face. Some people think it’s about control or perfectionism. They bristle, nervous that I’m judging them already. I, of course, am not judging them, but I think what they’re really nervous about is that as an organizer, I’m going to see their vulnerabilities. The backs of closets are personal. The bottoms of drawers are personal. Mess is intimate.
But I have no interest in perfection. It’s boring. Perfection is for algorithms and fake fruit, not human beings.
Music producer T Bone Burnett said, “Perfection is a second rate idea,” and I whole-heartedly agree.
Our things aren’t our things. They are our past. They affirm who we believe we are and make us feel safe. They are containers of meaning. Our life experiences lodge themselves in our belongings, everything pregnant with purpose and meaning. This is why it’s so damn hard to let go of things, or even just pull them out of the closet and take a look at them. And then to invite a stranger over to see it all can feel terrifying!
I organize to help you uncover the story of who you believe you are, release it if it’s no longer serving you, and help you to craft a new one.
Everyone gets lost sometimes. That’s the ebb and flow of life. I’m in the business of gearing up and descending into the cave with you to see how it’s working from the inside out. We find the story locked in the piles of clothes, root out the shame in the precariously overstuffed china cabinet, and craft a space that reflects who you are today and where you want to go.
Our culture is largely untrained in ways of home organization. And any housekeeping or purchasing habits we’ve learned from our families is becoming less relevant as we have technology that the generations before us never had, and careers and lifestyles that were never an option. We don’t have a blueprint. We are all consumer pioneers of technology and capitalism, in that sense. This wilderness makes a rich landscape for exploration. If we’ve got the courage to go exploring, we can uncover deeper self-knowledge, and create an unshakable foundation on which to build a beautiful, healthy and satisfying life.
May you live long and more often than not, feel supported, safe, and satisfied.
-Raleigh