I have several books on the subject that I have bought through the years, but they serve more as shelf decorations than as something I consult. I think that I feel that if they are nearby they will magically sort out those piles of paper. (I may have been unduly influenced by the story of the shoemaker’s elves in my childhood.) We are retired, for Pete’s sake, but sometimes I feel as overwhelmed with paper as I did when I was working. I love to see a clear, clean workspace, but I don’t love what goes into making it that way. Before I retired, I had a colleague who filed everything away in neat binders and never had a messy desk. I would be tempted to chalk this up to the fact that she was a naturalized German (pardon the stereotype), but I have a lot of German blood, and it just makes me yearn to be tidy. Once when I was moaning about this problem I was told that the natural state of the universe is entropy. I had to have that term explained to me at the time. My understanding was that the universe tends toward the disorganized. That’s comforting, but it’s not helpful. When we get the mail we try to dump all the unwanted items, but there are always some envelopes or catalogs that we feel we had better check out. It’s not the physical act of stashing or tossing, it’s the decisions that wear you down. Maybe I should just accept the fact that this is the way things are. There are, after all, much worse problems to have.
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