My dad, by virtue of being a scientist, was an extremely organized person. Everything had a place, and everything would be in its place, had it not been for us army of kids, always wanting to rummage through his drawers, his tool bag, his first aid box...we were curious, and his scientific mind embraced our insatiable curiosity as a genealogical trait, even though it meant never finding anything in its rightful place. Fortunately, for that, he had our mom.
Our mom, on account of being a mother of seven, did not have much room for organization. How workable could such an idea be, anyway? She was not running a boot camp, but a household full of adorable kids. Fortunately, most moms come equipped with a binary package of instincts and uncanny intuition. They are experts in gauging the workings of a child's mind, and follow the trajectory of their seemingly unreasonable reasonings. Owing to these wondrous characteristics, my mom could find practically anything and everything that had gone missing. And, that too in the strangest of places: not only under racks, or beneath a load of mattresses and pillows, but also in between the mounting pile of newspapers, or tucked deep inside old boots, and in the pockets of stowed away winter jackets...our house was small, but with immense possibilities to lose things...or hide them.
"Sometimes, a disorganised mind can latch on better to new possibilities/concepts/ideas, which fall outside the orbit of logical thinking patterns".
This is the conclusion which I recently formulated from my childhood observation. Not ground-breaking in its essence, such a conclusion did however, impart a new perspective into the potential a messy person might harbour. Of course, the exercise itself stemmed from the fact that my son happens to be rather woolly-headed and cluttered, when it comes to keeping his room, bookshelf, desk, and cabinets clean and tidy. He likes his mess. It is part of his individualism. "I know how to find my stuff, as long as you don't try to tidy it up," he often declares. Fair enough. I have to repose my faith in his latent potential to detect patterns in chaos, and in his capacity to stretch the tentacled imagination to nooks and corners where an orderly person might not dare to venture into. As Einstein once quipped, "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?" While this was obviously meant to be a jocular way to justify his own lack of organisation, rather than some kind of a serious observation into the human psyche, there's a quantifiable amount of truth to it.
A recent study by scientists at the University of Minnesota found that those with messy desks had greater proclivity towards creative thinking than those who displayed an affinity to cleaner and more organised workplace. Moreover, while the former was more inclined to take risks and proffer new approaches, the latter was better at following rules and schedules. "Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition, which can produce fresh insights," the research concluded. In yet another study, conducted around the same time, two sets of college students were each accorded starkly different ambience: one messy, and the other neat to the point of being sterile, and asked to 'invent' as many new usages for a Ping-Pong ball as they could. And, as per the report, based on the results, which was published in New York Times, the students in messy workspaces ended up proposing significantly more creative ideas than those in the neat offices. Needless to say, that such experiments are not conclusive in a way that translates into messy desks a genius make.
Yet, could it be purely coincidental that in terms of being cluttered, joining the ranks with Einstein, are other geniuses, like Van Gogh, Albert Ryder, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, and to come closer to our times, Steve Jobs? I hope so... for, I do pride myself in having taken after my beloved dad, in terms of being superbly organised: everything has a place, and everything in its place. As Adam Frank, the American physicist, referring to the universe's love affair with chaos, likes to point out, "Life is order and structure hammered out, for just a time, to give the blind universe its sight." I guess then, the onus falls on us tidy individuals of the world to keep the bulb burning...
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