Advertisement
Each day is a dining room table—
oak-patterned finish barely visible
below the stacks and scraps of papers
and errant caps, laptop emerging from
this mass of mischief, the pitfalls
and pearls of productivity.
What would it take for me to step away
from it—from the too-full agenda
that dictates my days, to the point that
taking the time to clean this mess
is a luxury I cannot afford?
What if I look at this disorder,
this disarray, as a disguise that belies
some truth about the real order of things?
What if I gently, gingerly accepted
that what is is not always what will be?
That sometimes you need to leave one
mess in order to make progress on another.
That what we need to keep us afloat in
the moment isn’t what we’ll need tomorrow.
That just because it looks like a mess
doesn’t mean that there really is one.
And just because you needed to let go
or hold onto something to survive, doesn’t
mean that you won’t decide in a moment’s time
that you are now ready to get up
and shelve these books to make space
for others.