Cluttered Desks for Authenticity

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

― Albert Einstein

 

For as long as I can remember, I have had a messy side of things – things, because I share things with my sister such as our bedroom, our bedside tables, our closets, and most importantly, our desk. Consider it a form of segregation, which also happens in the backseat of any car – I on the left, and her on the right, always.

My side of the desk has, for as long as we have had a desk, been cluttered. It has been vandalized, chipped into pasted on, blu-tacked and covered in all sorts of pens, accessories, papers, newspaper clippings and notes. Quite recently, it has been home for educational resources, and a photoshopped image of myself standing beside Jack Black. Below Mister Jack Black and I, an illegal green laser, a pair of sunglasses, a glue stick, a Jagermeister collector’s tin with over fifty HB pencils in them, a Harry Potter wand and an X-acto blade, headphones, and Lord knows what else is hidden near or underneath these things.

I have always had a cluttered desk. I would not, however, call it ‘messy’, nor ‘untidy’, nor ‘dirty’. It is certainly not smelly, nor is it sticky, nor will you end up having eraser pieces on your elbows if you sat there for a while. It simply is a home to all my collectibles, all my academic sources and all of my miniscule to-do-lists and not so miniscule booklist. It is now five pages strong, that booklist, and there is more ink than white on those five pages, an ever-growing list of books that I want to own and read.

I got to thinking, though, that perhaps there is a sense of authenticity in a cluttered desk, that mess is more than just junk, that mess implies a want for learning, a display of critical awareness. Like the above quote by Albert Einstein, what does an empty, rather tidy desk signify? To me, a tidy desk signifies the mind of a person who collects bits and pieces from Officeworks, displaying a sense of ownership over a piece of wood and a few journals, and nothing else. Those journals may not ever be written in. Those journals may end up being eaten by the owner’s cat, or dog.

I have thus come to a hypothesis, if you like, wherein I believe that a person whose desk is overly tidy has no room for a cluttered mind, for cluttered thinking, for thinking which suggests thinking itself, rather they look at things in a simplistic manner – whereas a person with a cluttered desk can stand the strains of cluttered thinking, resulting in a new form of organization that spawns from what ‘simple’ people view as ‘mess’.

I am by all means not intending to demean or offend those who have a nicely cluttered mind and a very tidy desk – if that is the way that you happen to operate whilst critically thinking, then I by no means commend you. But I am demeaning those who put on an act by purchasing a great desk and keeping it looking like it was the day that they had bought it because they never actually used it. I am simply seeing this occurrence through my own perspective, through a lens I have finessed to the extent where I start to hypothesize in the absence of beakers and chemical equations because I had never quite cluttered up my imaginary science desk, per se.

Perhaps I have scraped the surface of something that someone will now take with them and excavate, or perhaps I have just made you feel as though I am a horrible demeaning person. I beg to differ, though. I am just exploring an observation made by myself. My sister’s side of the desk is quite tidy, and not as cluttered, and her mind cannot formulate the things that I can, at the level that I can, hence I saw it appropriate to hypothesize in this manner.

For years, the books I collected would stay in mint condition because I saw them as collectibles rather than ‘use-ables’. I would look at them with pride as they were locked away safely in storage, and I would cringe at the touching of them by others. Now, I feel differently towards new books. Now, when I see a book, if it looks brand new then I think that it has not been delved into at a proper level enough to allow one to fully comprehend it, whereas if there is a book with crumpled paged, a lined spine, and a curved front or back cover, then I know that it has been read the way it was meant to by the reader, and that it was used for its purpose.

I suppose that is the same idea that I am trying to get to with my desk hypothesis. A cluttered desk means a cluttered mind, and neither of those things while cluttered are cluttered in the negative sense, rather in the positive sense.