Artisans, Creativity, and Tides

Requisite Untidiness

I have a love-hate relationship with messiness.

On the one hand, I feel satisfied when I tidy up the space I am working in and see things ordered, labelled, and placed. I think it has something to do with all the childhood exhortations about tidying bedrooms and my work preoccupations with efficiency, productivity, orderliness, and minimum waste.

On the other hand, I find it difficult to do anything other than work that bores me in a tidy space. There are no surprises, no searching for something I know I left somewhere and then finding it next to something I didn’t realise I was looking for. Of course, until it gets too untidy and reaches a tipping point where I cannot find space to work. It feels vaguely tidal. The stimulus I need is like driftwood at high tide, as the receding tide takes away what I no longer need, and I have to collect and sort what the tide has left to make space for what the next high tide will bring.

For me, tidiness is like friction - I need enough, but not too much.

I thought about this as I went through the settings on this Substack and was staggered at how many people I was following from whom I had either seen nothing or whose work I could not recall. I have no criticism of them; it is far more a message to myself on how easy it is to collect digital “stuff” because of the near-infinite space technology gives us and how that capacity can neuter our relationship with great material.

In Japan, there is a concept called “Tsundoku” (積ん読), which refers to the practice of acquiring books and letting them pile up, unread. The word combines “tsunde” (積んで), meaning to stack things, and “oku” (置く), meaning to leave for a while. It’s a familiar phenomenon for book lovers and collectors, where the intention to read exists, but the accumulation outpaces the actual reading.

That pretty much covers it, except that in a digital world, it can go far beyond books. If my Evernote, OneNote, and Kindle were physical spaces, I would need a major extension to a house that is already bigger than we need. The theory of diminishing marginal returns applies. In the digital realm, I can find what I want without storing it.

I am trying to instil in myself a “tidal practice.” Perhaps it’s like that line from the Seventies: “If you love something, let it go. If it comes back to you, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.” I’m working on letting the digital tide take out what it needs to, in the knowledge that what I’m looking for will be on the incoming tide at some point.

Accumulation of anything, from knowledge to money, saps our creativity.

We can only work on what is in front of us, and we need to make sure that it is what we are focused on to make it as beautiful as possible.