sonora2sonoma

While driving in the countryside yesterday, I passed a small ranch nestled amongst a grove of trees near the crest of a hill. As I sped by, a slightly heavy-set middle-aged woman was walking up the long drive leading to the ranch house. Surrounding the house, in seeming random fashion, were various piles of wood and whatnot. Odd pieces of old-looking equipment and a couple of abandoned cars were strewn about in seemingly haphazard fashion–a not uncommon scene encountered while driving the byways of rural America.

While noting the disarray, I found myself thinking of how the jumbled detritus might well serve as an apt metaphor for my life, depicting, as it were, the fascinating but entirely dysfunctional collection of unfinished projects I’ve accumulated along the way.

Over the years, my palace of preempted possibilities, postponed propositions and paused projects has grown more expansive, year by year, until it’s become a behemoth of ponderous proportions.

And that’s nothing to say about how handily my predilection for procrastination has passed over into the purview of the digital dimension. 

I discovered early on the benefits to be derived from delaying decisions digitally, deferring that duty to a more convenient time, such as “later,” when I would, magically, feel more dedicated to digging into the details.

Unsurprisingly, that special place I designated for the storage of incoming emails  diverted for further inspection in that mystical (and mostly mythical) time known as “later” quickly grew into a graveyard of good intentions, urgency having been dethroned by and transmuted into dregs of digital detritus.

There inevitably comes a time in such stories involving squirreled-away ‘stuff’ when a reckoning is due. Or, in my case,  way past due.

That time arrives when the time spent searching for something exceeds the time “saved” by storing it for future use. At that point, future use quickly becomes future abuse.

When the present is subsumed by the past, thoughts about how we create our futures assume more relevance. The false economy of mortgaging tomorrow to dodge drudgery today is a self-defeating enterprise based on lies we tell ourselves to avoid taking care of business when matters are most relevant.

Such accumulations, be they actual or virtual, represent the residue of repressed restraint, fogging the minds and blocking the energies of those condemned to reckon with them. The bedlam birthed by confusion and disorder fosters the misuse of valuable space that could be better served if not unduly burdened by clutter. Disorder creates confusion leading to virtual, physical and emotional chaos.  And therein might lie the answer.

In current parlance, the word “chaos” is usually employed to denote complete disorder and confusion. A lesser-known meaning of the word is “the formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe.” https://www.bing.com/search?q=chaos+def&go=Search&qs=ds&form=QBRE

In the Greek creation myths, chaos meant emptiness, the vast void, “the primordial state created by the separation of heaven and earth.” https://mythology.net/greek/greek-concepts/chaos

Viewed thusly, might chaos offer a chance at a new start, a clean slate, or “tabula rasa” on which to erect new constructs less burdened by bedlam? Perhaps.

Yet, as I write these words, I’m peripherally mindful of the various tasks I’m postponing in order to free up the time required to explore the ramifications of postponement.

It’s clear that orderliness hasn’t yet become the defining feature of my daily doings. In the meantime, it appears I can at least count on irony to spice up the soup.

Tim Konrad

February 7, 2021