Me(n)tal Shelving

My husband grew up in a neat,organized home. Whenever things got a little cluttery, items were collected, bagged and donated to a worthy cause. I, too, grew up in a neat, organized home. Whenever things got a little cluttery, my grandfather would build another wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling closet. Needless to say, the working definition of “a neat, organized home” was a subject of much debate in the early days of our marriage...well, O.K....still is. My husband's idea of neatness focuses on what you can let go of; my idea of neatness focuses on how you store the things you can't let go of just yet...

I think it was my grandfather who most influenced my “neat,organized” paradigm, partly by providing all those closets. In my childhood home, three of the four bedrooms each had one, with another two in the basement. Things were neatly stored, usually labeled, saved because you never knew when you might need something. Grandpa also had his carpentry shop in the basement of our house, neatly organized, filled with wood salvaged from old furniture, boxes of old hardware waiting to be repurposed, 60 years before the word was trending. After his death, my mother, telling the story of cleaning out the basement, described taking out bushel after bushel of boxes neatly labeled “broken locks”, “old hinges”, “old nails”, etc. She put a few bushel baskets out at the curb each garbage day. After she had dragged 54 bushels to the street, she said she just stopped counting as she cleaned out the rest of Grandpa's old shop. We had been married several years by this time, and my husband said that it was one of the scariest stories he had ever heard. He realized that day what he had married into – a powerful family heredity of hanging onto stuff...

Grandpa was gone by the time we bought our first house, so I was on my own to provide storage. I built bulk wooden shelving in the basement, and that took care of most of my clutter. Our next house, however, was a huge challenge. Never having lived in a house without a basement before, I found myself in a ranch on a crawl space with only a small utility room. In serious danger of having the contents of previous basements under every bed in the house, I discovered the joys of metal shelving. Three in the small utility room, more in the garage, I coped with having a place to store my stuff. In our third and present house, we again have a large unfinished basement, this time, filled with metal shelves. Much to my husband's relief, the above-basement living area is relatively “neat and organized”, largely due to these shelves in the basement and garage, providing storage of that stuff that might come in handy some day. But more importantly, my gracious, patient husband also has learned to appreciate the shelves as providing a way station for those things that his wife hasn't quite decided what to do with yet.

My paradigm for storage in my physical world is really just a reflection of the paradigm I have for my mental processes, for storing information and organizing my beliefs. I have metal shelving in my basement, in my garage; I have mental shelving in my brain, in my heart. I'm not a black and white thinker or decision maker. I have to put stuff in the basement for a period of time before I decide whether to allow it a permanent place in storage or plan to give it away the next time the purple heart-disabled veteran-epilepsy foundation person calls. In the same way, my mind needs to have that way station where I decide what to do with things spiritual, intellectual, cultural, political. I keep them on my mental shelf. I put ideas, concepts, dilemmas on my mental shelving, taking them down when I'm feeling introspective, turning them over in my mind, examining their worth and staying power, deciding whether I keep them, find a permanent place for them, or whether I let go of them, get rid of them.

There are all kinds of stuff found on my mental shelf. Am I a democrat or a republican or some green hybrid of the two? Independently undecided – back on the shelf... How do I really feel about the internet? Is the instant access to so many more things worth reading outway the instant access to so many more mindless distractions? Still wrestling with that one, still on-line... Does the big bang theory in fact say more about the book of Genesis than it does about Stephan Hawking? Is The Big Bang Theory worth watching for its superbly clever scientific nerdy humor, or is it just another tribute to television's sex culture? Still pondering both big bangs...

Matters of faith have always taken up a good amount of space on my mental shelf. Years ago, the inerrancy of scripture had a place on the shelf. After careful examination, it moved off the shelf to a permanent location, a definite keeper. The sovereignty of God was briefly on the shelf in the early days of my faith exploration, though it quickly became another keeper. The complementarian/egalitarian debate is still on the shelf, though one of them is always boxed up and ready to be tossed. I just haven't taken it out to the trash yet. The shelf has a large collection of intelligent design–evolution–creationism pieces sitting on it that I play with, examining each, fitting them together in different ways to see how they do or don't fit before putting them back on my mental shelf. The problem of evil has occupied a place on the shelf for as long as I can remember. I never know what to do about that one...

It is a great relief for me to know that in this world I don't have to have everything figured out and understood. I'm rarely certain about anything, and I'm never certain about anything quickly. I appreciate the metal shelves that have given me time to figure out what to do with old glass jars and those really great cardboard boxes. I appreciate the mental shelves that have given me time to figure out what to do with the remnants of my substantial collection of Catholic thought and to examine the still undiscovered purposes of prayer yet to be answered. Both sets of shelves bring me (and my spouse) a measure of peace as I sort through my stuff, and I consider myself blessed that I have both a patient God and a patient husband...

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on. - Havelock Ellis

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff. - Frank Zappa