Getting it together

I was reading a blog post here http://growandbegrown.blogspot.co.uk/ and it reminded me of this episode of the "popular US Sitcom" Friends.  Monica has a cupboard (aka closet) which is always locked. Now being a fan of the show you will know that Monica is the Empress of Neat Freakiness and Goddess of Clean.  Everything in her life is tidy.  When the cupboard is finally opened it is chock full of crap, everything piled up in a heap.  A whole mess of stuff.

It made me think about a tendency I have to "tidy".  Not specifically in a real way (though it has been known). More in a "life" kind of way.  I want to deal with stuff and move on.  I want to line all the different perspectives and emotions up, work through them in a systematic way and then pack them neatly up in lines, or file them, alphabetically, or maybe in time and date order.

Of course "life", by it's very nature, resists that.  "Life" is chaotic and crazy and unexpected and bonkers.  It can be dangerous, risky, beautiful, wild, surprising.  It doesn't want to be filed or labelled because the minute you do that it will smirk at you and change and defy the carefully shaped hole you have tried to squeeze it into.

I am getting better at just letting it happen.  There are days when I slip into old habits, thinking I actually have some kind of control (much hysterical laughter). But when I stop thinking that it becomes much easier, more fun, gentler, exciting.  When I let go of my categories, and they float up and around me like bubbles and pop in the sunlight, I feel a slow unclenching in my chest and I breathe differently.  It scares me.  But it feels more hopeful. 

I am hoping to one day make peace with my own "cupboard", the messy, junky, broken, crappy bits of my life, to lay them out in the sunlight, because they are part of me, they make me who I am, even when they are ugly and jagged around the edges.  And then eventually the grass will grow around them and blur the edges and soak them away.