Mess, chess and openness to chaos
A non-prophylactic era
Reframing messy living as an intentional strategy to navigate everyday chaos.
Messiness isn’t a moral failing. But holding some empty mental and physical real estate is useful – even if it’s just to visualise the possibilities of what we could put there.
The reality of mess is that it fills space with stuff. Too much stuff and logic itself becomes obscured under piles of papers and tote bags, all piled up high on the chair that you actually want to sit on.
I don’t have the time or inclination (cough) to tidy up, so a theory of openness to chaos at least puts a tidy adaptive lens on it. When all semblance of life-changing magic is lost, a working philosophy of functioning (or thriving) in messiness brings acceptance, and even innovation, when we suddenly find ourselves up to our knees in it.
Storage upgrade
I don’t exaggerate how deeply I exist in this lifestyle. There are 17 tabs open on the left-hand side of this G-doc in draft and 102 tabs lined up on my Chrome profile. All are Very Important. There are notepads everywhere. Pencils that appear from all angles. And the voice notes. Soo many voice notes. I ran out of storage on my phone, but it was only an Apple 6S, so I switched handsets.
We can agree that Proust wrote all 3000 pages of In Search of Lost Time with less. But I’ve just never found another sustainable way of being – 3000 characters worth of pithy pull-quotes from podcasts will have to do.
Mess in mind
Mess is more than a by-product of toddlers, politicians and people with social pathologies. The former child prodigy, chess player and martial arts world champ, Josh Waitzkin, kept a messy room and framed it as a metaphor for his idiosyncratic cognitive process. As he explains in The Art of Learning, visible mess – not blank space – essentially keeps his options in both sight and mind.
“I furthered my messiness for years by consciously leaving my living area chaotic, so I could practice organising things mentally and being mellow in the madness.”
This openness (and optimisation for) mess prepared him for chaos across every discipline.
Waitzkin’s non-prophylactic style shines on the chessboard, a direct expression of his personality.
“It’s my nature to revel in apparent chaos, I’ve always loved thunderstorms, blizzards, hurricanes, rough seas, sharky waters.”
He’d never put his hand in order playing cards either, “I leave the melds all over the place and do the organisation in my head.”
While (spoiler) identifying as a prodigy at anything has thus far eluded me, the essence of keeping a messy room, all-possible options, and every half-formed idea in the light, is a rationality that resonates.
Messy people hold a kind of kinship with night owls. Forced order and optimisation disrupt the cadence of their creative rhythms. To be messy with place and time is both an inherent risk and a strategy. But it’s worth playing in.
Waitzkin proves that while some people are messy through inaction, others, like himself, are messy through intention. To know this, and to understand why some people choose messiness and chaos can offer an insight into their thinking.
Check mate
That broad societal preference for tidiness, timeliness and certainty can give chaotic (messy, non-prophylactic players of any game) a hidden advantage. Conventional, prophylactic thinkers may try to make sense of another person’s strategy. That strategy isn’t fully formed and is subject to constant change. Connections are simply being made as they arise. And to messy minds, the connections come easy.
There are infinite options and subjective reasonings behind every choice we make. These grow exponentially within tech-led societies, with sense-making (and sometimes hallucinating) tools at our fingertips.
Individual messiness tends to work best at a creative, micro-level. Group chaos is harder to navigate, but at least without the expectation of order, the mind can stay open within it.
Is there a method in messiness? Only that it mirrors the ever-changing chaos that we’re already surrounded by. Filling space with stuff can be a choice, an approximation of strategy with leverage. If that mess leaves no theoretical chairs left to sit? Minds searching for connections can stand together.