Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: Purple (11/05/09)
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TITLE: Cluttered, Purple and Callous | Previous Challenge Entry
By Kathy Warnes
11/06/09 -
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My Mom's two commandments for growing up to be a solid citizen were, "Don't wear dirty blue jeans and don't keep a cluttered desk."
My blue jeans are clean, but my desk is purple and cluttered and to compound the crime, I'm callous about it. My desk is purple because I bought it purple at the Goodwill with the idea that I would refinish it. Months later it is still purple and I love it passionately enough to refuse to refinish it!
On top of my beloved purple desk is a pile of papers I've been meaning to classify and file. The sheet on top peeks at me with subtle reproach. It's only a few years old, I assure myself. Let no paper be classified and filed before its time. Indeed, what good are papers unless they are well-seasoned by time? Those yellowed clippings that show up so well on the purple desk background are merely biding time, aging like good wine and are valued as such by their owner. There's a purple feeling in being the owner of a cluttered desk, like all of the golden moments and important people in your life live in the letters, bills, and reminders on your desk. For an instant replay, just finger the papers and smile at the memories as they parade across your desktop.
There's adventure in a cluttered desk. Moses parting the Red Sea must have felt the same spirit of adventure that I feel when after a desperate two hour search of my cluttered purple desktop, I unearth that essential paper in the lower left hand corner. No explorer discovering a lost civilization could be more thrilled than me, after I stumble on a forgotten letter from a long lost friend who is now resurrected in my thoughts and life.
More clutter is begotten by a cluttered desk. I have a self-perpetuating system and I never again have to worry about starting from scratch. I know for a fact that the papers I filed away last year have doubled in population. Also, my paperclips have been influenced by this trend enough to conduct several secret marriages, with the inevitable result of multiple paperclips.
A person with a cluttered desk advertises importance and relevance. I'm suspicious when I visit the office of someone who is reputed to be important and busy and I see him or her sitting behind a walnut desk staring at an empty desk blotter. I search for the pile of paper work that advertises the written evidence of the earth shaking decisions this person makes every day. Nothing is valid without an Everest of paper work to back it up or a purple desk to support it.
A cluttered desk isn't the sign of a cluttered mind, just a busy one. As long as I know which pile belongs to business files and which one is those irreplaceable facts it took three years to research, why should it matter whether they're in the right pile or not or that there are multiple piles? The more ideas and activities I generate, the more clutter accumulates on my desk!
A word of warning, though. If you live with a compulsive Nancy or Ned neat, install a chain link fence or dig a moat around your desk if you want to preserve the relationship. It is a certainty that the day will come when Ned or Nancy will want to straighten up your desk for you, "so you'll know where everything is” or refinish it so "you won’t have to look at that hideous purple!” No amount of loving logic or passionate pleading will convince them that you already know where everything is and that you love purple.
If you can't hire a 24 hour guard to make sure everything on your purple desk remains intact, one solution is to move it, preferably to a gray, forgotten corner of the attic where no one will see it or care about how it looks. If that doesn't work, the only other solution is living alone in your clutter or concealing it well enough so your partner doesn't realize it's there. The seven-foot tall rubber plants around my desk are there to do more than grow!
Sometimes my purple desk reminds me of a purple robe, scourging, and cavalry and I’m not callous anymore, but I am still comfortably cluttered!
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