This is my official declaration of war against the forces of chaos, crapitation and lassitude that threaten the free world of my life. This isn’t just Bushian rhetoric, this is an announcement of full on storm-the-beaches-at-Normandy style conflict.
It’s also make-believe. I’ve decided to invoke the powers of imagination in my jihad against the clutter and smeckula that fills my life. It’s an approach straight from the Mary Poppins playbook, turn an onerous task into a game, but one that’s also got some feet in cognitive science.
A recent bit on NPR lamented that kids don’t get enough unstructured play these days. The shame of it is that unstructured play helps children develop executive function.
Uncluttering and decrapification are clearly executive function activities. Even though I lived in a make-believe world far longer than most kids–embarassingly long as I think about it, I somehow never found a way to integrate rules for uncluttered living. Somewhere there was a missing piece that I never picked up. In fact, I can remember distinctly one afternoon playing with my GI Joe, (I was about 8 years old) and being very frustrated because I didn’t know how to play. Of course I knew that soldiers fought the enemy. I knew the rules of attack and subterfuge. But I didn’t know the rules of the barracks. What was my soldier’s name? What was his rank? What was his relationship to the other soldiers? To his weapons and other gear?
So GI Joe went back in the footlocker. Until now.
The physical GI Joe doll is long gone, but the spirit of warfare and combat remains. And it’s going into my efforts at organizing my home life. I’ve drawn up battle plans, an impressionistic floor plan of our home, yard and garage and have a strategy mapped out. This week is D-day: I stormed the desk in my home office, decrapitated it, cleaned and polished the woodwork, removed all nonessentials and rerouted all necessary cables. From here I am going to push to cut a supply line between my office and the garage.
This kind of imaginary play is fun in a weird I’m-way-too-old-to-be-thinking-this-way kind of way. But I think that it will prove to be a valuable form of narrative therapy, and I have a hunch that this time it’s going to work.