Rivage
The clutter I have rearranged, removed, or retrieved from holding boxes sits in the bright light of lamps or on shadowy shelves just beyond illumination in the room my wife calls "the study".
The space, once laughingly described as a fourth bedroom, is a walk-in closet filled with bicycle parts, tires, tubes, an assortment of radios (some of them working) a few cherished books, batteries charged or waiting to be charged, two circulating fans, an AM/FM radio with three knobs and an analog dial, a sullen computer printer, and a copier.
There are tools that must be taken outside to use. There’s a push-button phone which replaced the dial or rotary phone. There’s one of those, too. The phones work. Young grandsons once slipped into the study to call their parents—over and over.
[Read more essays like this from writer Ed Cullen here.]
There are paper calendars on the wall, one for the current year, one for the year past. There are doctors’ appointments inked in, should the doctors forget to remind me.
On the shadowy shelves, repose tubes of topographic maps of West Feliciana Parish, now committed to memory from years on my bicycle. Shoes, cycling clothes, rain gear, and old telephone books round out the inventory.
The clutter laps up to a small table that holds jars of pencils, personal device chargers, and a Periodic Table of the Elements laid out like a place mat in an Alamogorda Diner. A serviceable office chair with lumbar support fronts a laptop.
This clearing in a forest of stuff is my writing cockpit. Here, I listen to people on the radio who say they can declutter my life. I may buy their book or listen to an interview that sounds remarkably like all the other instructions on clearing one’s life of clutter. Rid our spaces of unwanted things and we free our minds of unwanted, worn-out thoughts.
It’s true. Straightening, cleaning, and tossing releases a kind of endorphin that does not require running shorts, cycling shoes, or free weights.
This clearing in a forest of stuff is my writing cockpit. Here, I listen to people on the radio who say they can declutter my life. I may buy their book or listen to an interview that sounds remarkably like all the other instructions on clearing one’s life of clutter. Rid our spaces of unwanted things and we free our minds of unwanted, worn-out thoughts.
It’s an exercise worth doing even though we know the room will re-clutter and our minds re-fill. At work in the writing pit, I sense the remaining clutter that surrounds me, familiar things with good associations.
Who surrounds themselves with things that hold bad memories?
I cannot explain the relationship between core stuff and creativity. I cannot tell you why moving a jar of pens two inches to the left frees a jammed idea. But it does.
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