Every morning when I get dressed, I walk to my dresser, take two steps to the left, and dig through baskets, bins, and piles of laundry to find the clothes I will wear for the day. Some of it is clean, gathered into a basket to be banished to the corner of the bedroom for a few cycles of laundry until I finally get a wild spurt of motivation and put stuff away. Some of it is mostly clean, worn but not dirtied enough to justify devoting resources to its laundering. Some of it is not clean. Sometimes the piles mix together and everything gets washed only to return to baskets, but rarely to dresser or closet.
My life is made of piles. The dining table is a pile of mail, books, clothing, and items that have no place to live or that we used recently or that we thought we might use soon. The kitchen features piles of dishes—both freshly washed and recently used, piles of snack food, piles of onions and potatoes in bowls waiting to be cooked into meals, and piles of things that don’t belong in the kitchen, but somehow have earned squatters’ rights on the counters. In one corner, empty toilet paper and paper towel rolls overflow their bin, waiting to be torn into pieces and added to the compost outside.
There are piles out there, too—piles of composting animal bedding, piles of dirt, piles of rocks, piles of wood—all hoarded with the intention of putting them to use in the garden whenever we get around to it. There is hardly a place on my property that isn’t host to a pile of something. My nightstand, my bookshelves, my garage, my yard…
Things in piles are accessible—until they aren’t. When I put something away in a drawer or a cupboard, stack it neatly on a shelf, or store it in a protective bin there is risk—risk that I will forget I needed to complete some task that its out-of-placeness is reminding me of, or that it will be too much work to ever get out again and I will just stop doing whatever activity the thing exists to support, or that the “for now” place I assign it for the sake of tidiness will become permanent, however illogical, and I’ll never find it again.
Books on a bookshelf? Practically invisible, that is unless you want to find something to read. Then they go from being completely non-existent to completely overwhelming. But a few books set apart from the rest on a nightstand? So easy to see and remember and grab… at first. Eventually all things whether put away or piled become invisible, and only the anxiety of the space remains.
In one of my first jobs out of college, I worked with a messy person and a clean person. (I fell somewhere in between.) We compared the organizational strategies and psychologies of their piles versus files. The clean person said she needed an organized outer space to counteract the messy interior of her brain. The messy person said the messy exterior was like a pressure relief valve on her overly crowded and busy interior. Neither claimed to have an interior world that was clean and orderly. I didn’t have that either; my hybrid approach was also a reflection of a disorderly interior self.
I like to organize things. Take everything out of the kitchen cabinets and put it all back in so that it fits: stack the pans just so, put the cooking utensils in their proper places, put the square Tupperware containers on this side and the round ones on the other. I’m good at the project; I fall apart with the maintenance. If we get something new, if my husband puts something back “wrong,” or if I’m just in a hurry that day and don’t want to take the extra few seconds to properly nest the muffin tin inside the cake pan, the whole thing falls apart. And with time and small disturbances, it falls apart more. And more. And next thing I know—piles.
It’s like erosion: everything breaking down, falling down, piling up until it reaches its angle of repose. Like entropy: all systems trending toward disorder.
People say, “Don’t put it down; put it away.” Those people don’t understand the natural pull—the gravity—of piles. A few small things (that are out for a reason) attract a few more things. A handful of items becomes a pile, which attracts more things to it. Eventually the pile is a force unto itself—unstoppable and indivisible.
It takes a lot of energy to un-pile something, but it can be done. My go-to de-piling supplies include: interesting podcasts, snacks, caffeinated drinks, and blinders to all things that are not the target pile. You might be able to, but I can’t Pomodoro method my way through a pile—instead I take it on as one relentless slog. My reward at the end is that I don’t have to keep parsing and putting away bits of pile.
In the meantime, other piles in other places are hard at work, building themselves bigger, ensuring that I am never without at least one or two of them around. They travel with me on vacation, fight for space on the desk where I work, and snuggle into bed beside me when I sleep.
They are inevitable and inviolable like fate or destiny or kismet. Life gives some people lemons; to me, it gives piles. If I could just learn what the pile equivalent of lemonade is, I would be set. But since I don’t know what that is, I just live with them and try to embrace this life of piles.
