Last weekend, I did a little bit of summertime “spring cleaning”.  It was a task I’d been avoiding for awhile, but I decided it was time.

In my tidying frenzy, I encountered The Drawer.  You know the one I’m talking about – that catch-all drawer that holds stuff that doesn’t quite seem to go anywhere else.  It’s seemingly bottomless.  It’s the Mary Poppins bag of household storage.  Feeling ambitious, I decided to tackle it.

The first step, of course, was to take everything out of the drawer.  That way, I could see what I had, and move onto step 2, which was sorting all the things.  Step 3, of course, is to organize everything and put it away.  Some items would belong in other parts of the house; others would go back into the drawer – but this time with rhyme and reason, and possibly useful little drawer organizers.

The middle is always a mess.

Somewhere between steps 1 and 2, my spouse came into the room.  He raised his eyebrows when he saw the mess – objects strewn all over the counter top and floor, roughly sorted into piles, but mostly just looking like a heap of stuff.  Calm and bemused, he asked what I was working on.

I stood up, stepped back, and looked at what I was doing from his vantage point.  Immediately, it became as clear to me as it was to him: I had made a huge mess.

But then, an hour later, the mess was gone.  I’d sorted everything, put it into its rightful place, and not only was it no longer chaos – I knew where to find the scissors!  Life had gotten just a little bit easier and more organized – with a slight detour into what looked like a disaster zone.

Life can be like a junk drawer.

When we’re going through things in life, the middle is often a mess.  When you’re organizing a junk drawer, you can generally see that the mess is part of the process.  Yes, it’s possible that the phone might ring or it might be time to leave for an appointment, and the chaos will never get resolved.  (Or even that your kids or dog will run through the piles you’re in the process of organizing, and make everything even worse than when you began the project!)  But for the most part, it’s a small task and it’s easy to see the end game.

Messes in life aren’t necessarily like this.  The role of the messy middle is most easily seen in hindsight: “I’m so glad I struggled with x because now I have y.”  Things like…

  • Even though it was horrible, I’m glad I went through a divorce, because now I’m in this great, new relationship.
  • When I got laid off, I thought my life would be over, but it led me to consider and pursue a whole new career, and I have a kind of deep satisfaction that I didn’t know was possible.
  • My illness really gave me empathy for others, and after I got better, it led me to the gratifying volunteer work I now do.

But when you’re in the middle, you don’t know what the end will look like – and that ambiguity is what makes the middle hard.

The stories we tell ourselves

So the challenge is to breathe through the messy sprawled contents of the junk drawer, to practice self-compassion, and to survive the hardest parts.  We never know what’s waiting on the other end.  And frankly, the ending won’t always be a happy one, which is the hardest part.

Some people call this “everything happens for a reason” and others will say “the universe has a plan”.  To be honest, I don’t think I believe in either of those platitudes.

Instead, here’s what I believe: We are meaning-making creatures.  We find rhyme and reason to explain the things that challenge us.  So when we’ve come out the other side of something hard, we look for a reason that it might have happened.

We can get stuck in our stories and view ourselves as victims.  Or we can try to understand what lessons the hard stuff might have held, and try to grow from it.

When you do that – make meaning of the hard stuff and use the lessons you’ve learned to move forward – that’s the final step in organizing the junk drawer.  And maybe now, having gone through everything you did, it will be just a little bit easier to find the scissors.