I love office supplies. I love office supply stores. Sure, they sell pens and paper and binders
and staples, but what they really sell is the illusion of order. I can buy that all day, every day.
My social media feeds
right now are full of ads for different kinds of planners and journals. The ads have lovely photos of calendar pages
with neat handwriting, color coding, stickers.
They have slogans that encourage me to meet those goals, realize those
dreams!
Maybe those systems work.
Here is what I do
know: reaching goals is seldom an
orderly process and probably has nothing to do with pretty penmanship, unless
that is, in fact, the goal itself.
We reach goals by setting
plans, yes. Those plans need to be
orderly enough that we can decipher them, but they certainly don’t need to be
color-coded or sticker-based. (That
said, back when I was a non-profit administrator and later when I was an office
manager, I learned that people will do a remarkable amount of crazy stuff to
get a gold star sticker…)
We also reach goals by
understanding that our plans may not match up with reality. The real path to a goal is seldom charted out
only once, in ink, in a tidy progression from point A to point B. The path is more like a wave or a squiggle,
with unexpected high and low deviations.
We go forward a while, then stop.
Sometimes we go backwards. Sometimes
we take a side path and realize that was what we should have been doing all
along.
Some of us do excel using
fancy planners and stickers and colored ink.
For some of us, finding the ultimate organizational system really will
be the key to unlocking our dreams. But
some of us really need permission to wallow around in the messy process of
creation.
I’m on my own messy
journey and I’m happy to accompany any fellow travelers.
