Order

Getting your ducks in a row.  How to take charge of your life.  There was a little self-help book by that title that my mother put in my Christmas stocking when I was twenty-one.  She made no secret of her disapproval of the way I was living and I made no pretence of accepting or tolerating her expressions of disapproval.  Oh, we had fun together, my German mother and me!  I did have a glance at the pages of this little book.  I couldn't see it working for me.  Not because my life lacked order.  I was a twenty-one year old male.  Of course I lacked order.  And no one was going to impose on me or on my life their version of what I might or might not be needing.

I did have a basic routine.  I was generally up early in the mornings, eight or earlier, depending on my employment situation or schedule.  I always began my morning with a long walk of up to two miles or so.  Returning home I had a glass of orange juice and a healthy breakfast, usually granola with yogurt and fruit.  If I was working that's how I would spend the day.  But stable employment was difficult to find for young males even in the seventies.  No one I knew seemed interested in helping connect me with decent employment, and low wage employment made post-secondary education out of my reach.  My mother, like many women of her generation lived in her own bubble world and it was impossible to communicate with her about this.  She could never understand why I found her infuriating.

My life did not lack order.  It was wanting for focus.  I read copiously, especially literary classics: Virginia Woolf and Fyodor Dostoevsky were two of my faves.   I was always meeting interesting people and getting into endless conversations and visits with fascinating strangers.

Looking back, I realize that there was a certain order to my young life and also a huge simplicity.  This was pre-high tech.  No one had a computer and the very idea of the internet was so sci-fi that no one would have believed what would be the every-day banality thirty years later.  There were no smart phones, no cell phones.  You had one landline phone in your home.  Two if you were well-off.  And television of course.  And books, magazines and newspapers.  Instead of sending emails you visited people.  Public space was much quieter since no one was yapping on their phone.  There were payphones.

Getting older, my life has had to become considerably more disciplined and organized with all the networking and communications technologies and the increasingly demanding workloads.  In order to cope I have had to become hyper-organized.  Everything in its place.  Necessity makes obsessive-compulsives of us all.

One positive thing that has come out of all this.  The sense of order feels organic.  It comes from within.  Ever since I was very young I have been developing this sense of order, or maybe it has been developing me.  There are things that can and should never be imposed from without.

Ever since my mother's death twenty-six years ago appear to have internalized her and she has been living in me like an incubus, dictating and putting my life in order.  So I have become more disciplined and more organized than ever.  Almost like Mom.  Except for one little difference.  It is all happening on my terms.