One of the most practical and sound epigrams I’ve ever come across is, “Have a place for everything and have everything in its place.” It encapsulates a piece of wisdom that, if followed, can go a long way in de-cluttering and de-stressing our lives.
Disorderliness is a weakness that we often unquestioningly accept as inevitable, usually citing lack of time or the frenzied pace of life as justification. Thus we misplace vital things that we use and need every day and then spend precious time searching in vain for them. This, of course, can be most frustrating especially when time is at a premium at the start of a working day – with children having to be sent to school and a host of household duties having to be done before one rushes off to work oneself.
Mark Twain hit the nail on the head when he quipped, “Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else; this is not advice, it is merely custom.” How true! Most mornings as my grandchildren prepare to go to school I witness a frantic (and often fruitless) scramble to locate misplaced school requisites – pens, pencils, erasers, textbooks, note-books et al. I’ve also seen adults, desperate to reach their workplaces on time, comb the house for missing spectacles, mobile phones, car keys and other items. It sometimes borders on bedlam as the deadline to leave home nears.
An orderly home goes a long way in helping us find the things we need urgently, thus saving us valuable time. And conversely, of course, a disorderly home can cause chaos. Indeed, orderliness can help improve the quality of one’s life, making it stress-free and hassle-free especially when one’s hard-pressed for time. And who isn’t these days?
As a time-saver there’s nothing to beat orderliness. The disorderly often fritter away precious time searching for essentials that the orderly (including yours truly) have little or no difficulty in finding, thanks to their methodical way of doing things.
Teaching children to be orderly and systematic in their habits will prevent their misplacing items of everyday use and eliminate the consequent waste of time searching for these. It will also help maximize the time available for study and other productive work. Inculcated in children at an early and impressionable age, personal orderliness can become a salutary life-long habit. The easiest way to achieve this is by setting an example oneself for children to follow.
Clutter, of course, can be confusing and a constant headache; it can keep things concealed, sometimes irretrievably. On the other hand, orderliness is a highly desirable trait that, besides being aesthetically pleasing, can bring order into one’s life without much effort. Indeed, the need for orderliness is most acutely felt only when one searches fruitlessly for something that’s urgently (and vitally) required.
All it takes is the will to follow the aphorism mentioned earlier – even if it means a bit of personal inconvenience – and one will seldom be at a loss to find anything one needs at home or at work.
gnettomunnar@rediffmail.com
