The Uncluttered Life

by

Special to United Methodist Insight | May 12, 2025

I appear to spend my life trying to bring order out of chaos, of seeking the ideal of the “uncluttered life.”

There is the “before sleep” routine of ensuring I awake to a clean kitchen and a neat house. Then, the morning routine: get up, make the bed, get dressed, and leave the bathroom and closet ordered for the sake of my peace of mind. Clean the kitchen after breakfast, do a morning garden check, pull weeds that may have emerged—well, not MAY have emerged, more like, “Threaten to take over since yesterday,” clear out email inbox and text messages.

Periodically, I see what essentials need to be replenished, knowing that if I do this in advance, I save the frustration of needing something and not having it. And these things are only the beginning of the endless task of keeping the chaos down and seeking some order in the endless task of decluttering.

I often think of this particular translation (Tree of Life) of Genesis, chapter 1, verse 2.

Now the earth was chaos and waste, darkness was on the surface of the deep, and the Ruach Elohim was hovering upon the surface of the water.

The earth was chaos and waste—and what follows is an account of God putting it into order, which, of course, lasts only a short time. Even God can’t keep things in order.

Consider the first few minutes of the famed Downton Abbey TV series. There, a houseful of servants busily take care of hundreds of household details before the family they serve even thinks about opening their eyes.

Oh, how I wish . . . and then I wonder who takes care of all the details of the servants’ lives . . . and I figure they don’t have lives at all—only the rich and powerful do, and all those minions make it possible.

And I have not even begun to mention the unreal mess of nearly 40 years of computer files. While I am more than capable of cleaning out closets and tossing unnecessary things, I become paralyzed at doing the same thing to my computer files. I’m a lifelong writer, and especially a letter writer, a very early computer adopter, a perennial student, and have generated untold thousands of files.

How about the photos? With the phone cameras now so handy, they proliferate freely. I gave up trying to clean them up. Oh my. For those of a certain age, you will understand when I say I have created a “Fibber McGee’s Closet” of electronic detritus.

It’s so bad that when I found out that a granddaughter, who is graduating from high school and plans to pursue a degree in data management, needed a summer job, I said, “I’ve got the perfect one for you.”

Bless her—not only is this the ideal paid internship for her chosen speciality, but she also gets to explore the intricacies of her Granny’s very scattered brain and use her considerable talents to create a solution.

Oh, by the way, so as not to mess up her work, I created a separate folder for my current work files to be ordered later. It already contains nearly 700 MB of files, likely around 500 individual files. Again, I say, “Bless her.”

Finally, there is the situation with Ozzie and Harriet, the doves who have taken up residence at our house.

The number one thing I have learned about them? They are VERY MESSY nest builders! It happened that directly underneath the area where they decided to settle on a post on our patio was this planter, affixed to the brick wall.

It was empty before Ozzie and Harriet arrived. It is now full of dropped nest-building material, and two to three times this much has landed on the ground around it.

A note: did you know that 18-year-olds have zero idea who “Ozzie and Harriet” are or have ever heard of Fibber McGee and his closet? Ah, the generation gap!!!

Anyway, here’s the deal: when we permit life to take up residence in our minds, our brains, our home, there will always be chaos.

Get married? Welcome to the chaos of learning to live in intimacy with a totally different human being.

Have a child (or two or three or . . . ? Need I say more?

Start a business? The very moment things seem to be going well, you will discover that a key employee is leaving, or has embezzled funds, or there is a new government regulation or crazy tariff that tosses everything into disarray.

Engage in volunteer work in churches or other organizations? Are you kidding me? You will soon become painfully aware that no two people agree on very much of anything, and seeking order and cohesiveness is very much like the proverbial “herding cats” metaphor.

In many ways, Ozzie and Harriet’s choice of abode for the current nesting season has created interesting problems for us. Among other things, we dare not lower the electronic screens that protect our southwest-facing den from the heat and overly bright light of the setting sun.

Fortunately, there are some tall trees behind us, but we still face some uncomfortable months, assuming they will rear more than one brood up there. I also suspect, once these eggs successfully hatch, that daily bird poop clean up with be added to the daily doggie doo clean up job.

And so, I’ve decided to glean three life lessons from this unexpected baby-bird hosting adventure.

First, real life is always messy. Deal with it. The clutter of living will never go away.

Second, as much as I want to, I cannot communicate with Ozzie and Harriet in any meaningful way. We do not speak the same language. The same is true of human communication: even if we technically speak the same language, we all understand the world differently. Conflicts and misunderstandings are inevitable, messy, and often painful.

Third, the nature of life means one creature’s need for safety and survival will affect a different creature’s need for something else, like a non-twig strewn patio and functional screens.

Essentially, it comes down to this: a perfectly uncluttered life is a meaningless one. I choose meaning—the and chaos that accompanies it.

And now, I need to get to the laundry . . .

Author and columnist the Rev. Dr. Christy Thomas is a retired clergy member of the former North Texas Conference, now the merged Horizon Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished with permission from her Substack blog, "Pondering Life, Old Age and a Crazy World."