Image from my personal gallery
It's not how it looks, it's how it feels.
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Before I start talking about me, I must say that I have a friend, almost a sister, with whom I have a friendship of many years, who is a compulsive hoarder. Arriving at her house can be an unpleasant or awesome experience, it depends on how you assume to see a lot of valuable or not, cluttered everywhere. My friend has been divorced three times and has moved many times. By this I mean that I firmly believe that external clutter has to do with the way your inside is; that is: as it is on the outside, so it is on the inside.
I am a woman who tries to keep things in order, although to be honest, I think I tidy to find a visual harmony, not because I would die if there is something out of place: I tidy to live and it is not that I live to tidy. For example, my clothes are sorted by color in the closet and each drawer of the closet is for each thing: underwear in the first drawer, pajamas in the second, beachwear in the next and so on. This allows me to know where everything is and saves me time when looking for something I need.
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However, I must accept with much regret, that as a teacher, every semester I begin to orbit in a chaos that has become normal for me. Papers are common on my desk, so are books. Those books, which are normally in my personal library, arranged alphabetically and by literary genre, rest on my desk until the semester is over. The same happens with the exams not withdrawn by the students, which remain in a folder until a certain period of time and then they are papers that I recycle.
During the semester, sheets of paper with phone numbers, messages, addresses, attendance sheets, multiply, as if they were mating on my desk, creating my paper chaos, which I know will disappear only when the semester is over. Not before.
The order I have with my books, I also have with my movies and my CDs: they are arranged in alphabetical order and by genre: mystery, erotic, narrative, poetry, in the case of books; merengue, classical, tropical, in the case of music. Since there is an order, every time I take out a CD, a book or a movie, there is a void that will allow me not only to know where to put the object again, but also to know what is missing. You don't know what I suffer when I lend a book and it is not returned.
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As for my inner order, almost a year ago, my youngest nephew, a beautiful 18 year old boy, died of cancer. His illness and subsequent death shattered my life into pieces. The emotional chaos brought on by his death shut down many areas of my soul, caused several walls of my heart to fall down, cobwebs came out of some corners of my eyes, and dust gathered inside me. But that's okay. Over the months, I've begun to clean up my insides: sort out my tears, shake out the sadness, bring out the accumulated, light up what was dark. I am becoming me again.
At the beginning I was talking about my friend, because when I go to her house and see her chaos, since I know her and what she is going through, I don't judge her disorder and it doesn't affect me either, in the sense that I don't refuse to be with her. I believe that order is within us: order begins within us. If there is order, peace within me, no visual noise can disturb me.
In short, to order our belongings, that each thing is in the place where it should be, and when I speak of belongings, I also speak of what belongs to us most: our feelings.
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##### The images are from my personal gallery and the text was translated with Deepl
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Thank you for reading and commenting. Until a future reading, friends
