I’m dreaming of a neat office ~ March 11, 1999

David Heiller

My office at home tends to be a catch-all for things that are in transition. It has piled up with a lot of stuff lately.

Our short-lived rocker. The cardboard
 electric was quite good enough.

I don’t want to call it junk, because it’s not junk, yet. It’s still at the stuff stage.

There’s the electric guitar that I got my son for Christmas two years ago. It was a gamble, and I lost. He has played it twice, maybe. But until he feels the urge to take after Jonny Lang, or until I feel the urge to take after him, it has found a home in my office.

Or the box of Dickens Village boxes that we inherited from Cindy’s mom, Lorely. You know your office is cluttered when it contains a box of boxes. The village has found a temporary home in our living room on the piano. We left it up after Christmas in honor of Lorely. The village contains a house with a light that goes off and on by its own accord. We think that Lorely is living in it, and sometimes she stays home and sometimes she goes out, which is certainly her right.

The box of boxes for the Dickens Village pieces have to be saved for when—or should I say IF—we ever take the Dickens Village down. So it sits in my office.

A small portion of my mother's 
Dickens Village. Putting it up was a ritual to
remember her for a number of years.

There’s the Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner, which comes in handy for sucking up the dead flies that drift down at all hours. And my guitar case, and old photos in frames, and old calendars, and an old computer, and a pail of crayons, and a folding chair, and a fire extinguisher that I should hang on the wall one of these days.

And there are—or were—the papers, the receipts and brochures, the old bills and bank statements, the piles of papers that started out on top of the filing cabinet and then spilled onto the floor.

I’m not a good filer. If something needs to be filed, it should be filed right away, but that never seems to happen. It starts as a small pile, but gradually builds into a volcano that spews in all directions.

Dr. Donna Cronin is like that. She says she has a PHD: Pile Higher Deeper.

I was at a friend’s house the other day, standing in his office, and it made me feel better to see that it was cluttered too. It looked a lot like my office, except instead of Twins pennants on the wall he had a poster of different kinds of lettuce.

David laying out the paper in Askov. So much stuff.
(not to be confused with junk)

He said it used to be his office, but it has become more of his wife’s office now. His words carried a wistful tone, and I could sense that he wasn’t real happy about the change, although I would be willing to bet some serious money—if I had any—that his old office didn’t look any neater than his shared space.

I might be wrong. But it’s one thing to have an office full of your own clutter, and quite another thing to have to put up with some else’s stuff. The same goes for the garage, or your bedroom dresser, or any territory that you claim as your own.

In his office in Caledonia.
 Malika said that this photo shows why he
is so smart: his brain is clearly plugged in.

I’m on a mission to clean up the office, and I’ve made some progress, thanks to a newly reorganized filing cabinet. All those papers I mentioned earlier have been filed or thrown away. So far I have tossed out two 50-pound bags that had been emptied of dog food and filled with papers.

I condensed some of the files too. For example, I had one file labeled brochures, and one labeled pamphlets, and one labeled warranties and they all held basically the same thing! Which was anything that looked like a brochure, warranty, or pamphlet.

Why did Ι need to save a brochure on canning vegetables? Or a pamphlet for a blender that broke five years ago? Or the owner’s manual οn bicycle that we bought for our 15-year-old son when he was four?

So I reduced three filing cabinet drawers of, papers to one drawer, which left two drawers free to hold some of the stuff on the floor. So now the office floor only has four boxes of stuff on it. And they will disappear soon! I’m going to find a different home for them. In the kids’ rooms.

Then my office will be neat and orderly, like my life, and the dog will bring me my pipe and slippers, and I’ll sit in my smoking jacket in the evening, reading William Butler Yeats while Cindy bakes bread and nurses the baby in rocking chair, a fire glowing in the hearth nearby.

And if you believe that, I’ve got some land to sell you in Birch Creek Township.

Sometimes you have to trade in your letters ~ March 21, 2002

David Heiller

Cindy and I were playing Scrabble on March 16. She was beating me (as usual) by a score of 203 to 114. I took my turn and got up to 138.

Then Cindy skipped a turn and traded in her letters for new ones.

I made another decent play and got up to 166.

So now the score was 166 to 203. Look out, Cindy!

But wait.

Cindy played the word “cleansed.”
It was a Scrabble, which is worth 50 extra points. Plus it started on a triple word and ended on a triple word, which means you multiply the value of the word by nine. So she added 168 points to her score and that, as they say, was all she wrote. She ended up beating me by 235 points. Her margin of victory was more than my total score!

There is a Scrabble lesson here: Sometimes you have to cash in your letters and miss a turn in order to improve your chances of success. It’s hard to do, because you give your opponent a chance to catch up. But it often leads to better things, which Cindy illustrated rather brilliantly.

It applies to other things as well.

I am sure that David was coming up with a good play here.

Robert Pirsing had a variation on this lesson in his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. When he was working on his motorcycle and not making any progress, he would get frustrated and try to force things. Often he would break something or make it worse. He learned to walk away and do something else when he hit a roadblock. He found that when he came back, he could fix the problem. He saw it differently, and he had a different attitude. I’ve taken that advice to heart many times and find it is true also.

When all else fails, get out your banjo.

It’s true in my profession. Every beginning journalism student or writer of any kind is told, or soon learns on his own, that the best, thing you can do after you write something, letting it sit for a while, then go back and read it with a fresh mind. You’ll often see ways it can be improved.

For my hobby of playing music, it holds true also. I heard a banjo player at a workshop once tell the students that there are times when he doesn’t play the banjo, because it just doesn’t, feel right, it doesn’t go well, it doesn’t work. I have learned to recognize those times and do something else. It was good to hear a professional say that, because I find that I sometimes get frustrated with my playing, and I’ve learned to put my instrument down and do something else at times like that, rather than force it.

Don’t force the issue, unless you have to.

That’s my point. As Cindy showed me last week, a little patience can pay big dividends. I bet it holds true in your profession. Maybe that’s why God invented coffee-breaks.