Confronting a Workspace That's More Mess Than Nest

“How will I ever know anything in the middle of all this warmth and space, all this supershelter? I want to feel like the trampolinist when he falls back to earth and to gravity. To touch the earth with heaviness – just to touch it. God, expose us, take away our padding and our room.”

-Martin Amis, London Fields

 "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

-Gustave Flaubert

This past week, I’ve become mildly obsessed with improving the ergonomics of my home office.

It’s got nothing to do with being stuck in Quarantine; I’ve worked from this home office for eight years, and never once have I felt overly compelled to optimize my environment, although certain aspects of its configuration — a too-small under-the-desk space, a shitty keyboard, no good way to shift from stand-up desking to sit-down desking — have bugged me from the get-go.

And it’s got nothing to do with Boredom; I have no childcare due to the aforementioned Quarantine, but I do still have to work, and my child is, um, demanding, and the logistics of that are as impossible as they sound, rendering malaise a luxury of a bygone era.

In truth, my sudden impulse to ergonomize feels mostly like a metaphor.

You see, back in the Ides of March, when all this mess began, I unexpectedly quit my Dream Job.

I suck at math, and although I was smart enough to marry a math teacher in order to avoid ever doing math again, even he could not work out a calculus resolving the impossible logic of two parents working full time for three months without any childcare. (A few friends have managed the feat, out of sheer necessity or force of will, and their ragged countenances indicate it was … challenging.)

Something had to give. And it was my beloved second job as the managing editor of a sweet local magazine.

That decision felt both tragic and unavoidable. I’m now focused entirely on capital appeals paralegal work, and anticipating a soonish time when the kid goes back to school and I can map out my creative future with fresh eyes.

Finishing my series of e-books for writers is first on the list; I’ve been hammering away at this project for three years and must now arrange the resulting half-million words (that’s not a typo) into about 30 ebooks and 20 tertiary products, all simultaneously, because that’s how they came to me, and also because I’m nuts.

But how?

Martin Amis’s protagonists cried out for gravity’s squeeze, and the author himself endorses a similarly pressurized approach to creation called the Flaubertian Line – A staunch belief that order and routine are key to unlocking the wildest outer reaches of a writer’s imagination.

It’s the literati’s equivalent of hip-to-be-square, and it resonates for me: Get your shit together, stop making messes, and your creativity will take center stage.

Unfortunately, my office is so cluttered that I can barely get the closet doors to open or close, let alone gain access the shuttered recesses of my creative subconscious.

So I’ve felt inspired to re-envision my cluttered nest in those precious stolen moments when I’m not working or watching the kid or exercising or sleeping. To help me in the mission, I’ve purchased:

·      Mouse and keyboard wrist rests

·      A top-of-the-line standing desk foot pad

·      A functioning Bluetooth headset

·      A new keyboard

·      A better monitor

·      Central air-conditioning

Basic stuff, excepting the central A/C, but as a penurious writer, I’ve made do without most of it for these many years. And, as improving one’s physical environment means casting off at least as much as you acquire, I’ve also ditched a slew of failed systems and optimistic hoard piles, including:

·      Two stuffed file stackers (which served, mostly, as repositories for junk paper)

·      300 (mostly unread) back issues of my favorite magazines

·      50-or-so books I have finally acknowledged I’ll never, ever read

·      A drawer of abandoned journalistic gadgets, including two recorders, three old phones, a fiddly battery recharger, and a glitchy wireless Mac keyboard

Still left to do:

·      Sloughing off the contents of a three-drawer file cabinet

·      Trading in my wobbly nursing rocker for an actual reading chair

·      Organizing the pile of published magazine and newspaper clips stashed heartlessly in my closet  

I’m no Marie Kondo; I’m a hopeless packrat. I lost patience with The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up three chapters in and gave it to my minimalist sister, who thought it was brilliant, lending credence to my theory that Kondo’s theory only helps people who don’t cling to junk to begin with.

This process of conscious acquisition, though, paired with a little old-fashioned letting go, has felt meditative and healing and, dare-I-say, profound. Cleaning out a workspace forces an honest consideration of what’s serving you and what’s just taking up space, what’s bringing you joy (that word!) and what’s bringing you pain.

Life piles up. It drowns us with its detritus and its lingering mementos. And then something cataclysmic appears to sweep it all away. Like, say, a Quarantine.

That Dream Job, plus my privacy and my silence and every inch of space — it’s all been swept clean away these past three months. No padding, no room.

I’m not sure such a squeeze is helping my productivity, but there’s this other, more fundamental thing I’m coming to understand: the universe isn’t destroying all the things I love; she’s merely making space for new things, albeit in a pitiless and pressurized kind of way. And so I’ll help her.

Cleaning out my office and finally shilling out for some functional office equipment? That’s my reciprocal gesture of Faith and Goodwill. And if not those things, at least a demonstration of Acceptance.

It’s me saying to the Universe, “Here, Universe. Fine. OK. Take this. And this. And also that. Take it all, ya big sicko! But just please kick me back something not-totally-awful in return.”

She hasn’t answered me yet, but that’s to be expected.

I am still cleaning.