Proud mess

Ah! Enfin, des voix s'élèvent pour défendre mes tendances au désordre. Mon espace de travail est un fouilli continuel, à la maison j'ai un atelier enseveli sous des... "choses", le désordre de ma chevelure est légendaire et je partage ma vie avec une femme adorable, belle et intelligente mais qui n'aiment pas le désordre. On s'organise comme on peut pour s'endurer sur ce point. Aujourd'hui je tombe sur un article dans le NY Times qui vient à mon secours: Saying Yes to Mess.

Quelques citations. Dans le désordre:

His studies and others, like a survey conducted last year by Ajilon Professional Staffing, in Saddle Brook, N.J., which linked messy desks to higher salaries (and neat ones to salaries under $35,000), answer Einstein’s oft-quoted remark, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?”

Mess tells a story: you can learn a lot about people from their detritus, whereas neat — well, neat is a closed book. Neat has no narrative and no personality (as any cover of Real Simple magazine will demonstrate). Mess is also natural, as Mr. Freedman and Mr. Abrahamson point out, and a real time-saver. “It takes extra effort to neaten up a system,” they write. “Things don’t generally neaten themselves.”

Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.