Where To Put It?

Any organizer will tell you that stuff needs a place of its own. Without a designated home, the nutmeg-grater will hang out on the counter, or lounge in the dish-drainer after you use it. Without their own space in a drawer or a closet,  homeless T-shirts will slump in a chair or insinuate themselves into the ill-defined textile mass that is probably the clean towels, but it's a little hard to tell because--wait: are there socks in that drawer, too? Stuff piles up; that's its nature. When we establish a home for each bit of stuff, we increase the chances that we will actually get the stuff put away. Makes life more manageable. Makes the stuff itself more manageable, and so, more useable.

In my life, non-physical stuff needs to have its home, too, or it becomes unmanageable, and so, unusable. I had a terrible time meditating anything but very sporadically until I figured out where to "put" meditation in my day.  Some would call this the process of forming a habit, and of course it is, but to me it feels like putting things in their proper place, temporally. Without a home in my schedule, things-to-do might as well be hidden in the mess at the back of a drawer. I don't remember they're there.

  

Every once in a while, I miss something, or remember that I used to use it or do it all the time, and wonder where on earth it went. I root it out and, having learned from those who teach organization, try to find it a proper home. There's  a point in the process when I wander about with the stuff, sometimes literally, wondering where its home should be. (Nope: doesn't fit in that drawer/doesn't fit with the rest of my schedule for Wednesday...Oh! Maybe here...?) It's a bit like (musical) sampling, or so I imagine, if we think of sounds as another kind of stuff. We  start with a really cool or useful or evocative sound. Then we have to figure out where (and/or when) to put it in a piece of music.

At this point in the history of sampling, the integration process is pretty sophisticated, but some early examples have a slightly awkward, "where does this thing go...?" feel to them. Here is Kon Kan, from 1988: I Beg Your Pardon. I think the sampling works on the level of lyrics and ideas, here. Musically, it feels slightly random and pieced together. It's admirable in its own, innovative way, and might encourage those attempting to solidify habits or designate proper homes for stuff; sometimes these things start off feeling awkward, but the process goes more smoothly, becomes more sophisticated and feels more automatic, over time.

Today created places for two homeless things in my life. Blogging and quinoa have been problematic for a while. The problem with blogging: life shifted a bit when my mother moved into town this spring--shifted just enough to tip blogging out of its place. It settled to the bottom of the messy drawer that is my schedule, where I'd occasionally bump into it while searching for something else (yoga class, for example), and miss it, but not actually take the time to make space for it. The problem with quinoa: I haven't cultivated a habit of cooking with it. A bag of it has a physical home in my kitchen, but quinoa doesn't have its own proper place in my meal-planning process.

Solutions came with a recipe for Braised Pears with a Soy-Ginger Glaze from Boston Organics. I wanted to try this recipe for several months, but didn't, because I couldn't think of what to eat it with. It seems to be made for a kind of meat-centered meal I don't eat. I gave up on making it, then realized my friend Sid would have good ideas for accompaniments. He suggested tofu, quinoa. My thought was, "Oh! so that's what to do with the quinoa!" How lovely when these snippets and pieces find a home together, in an evocative song, a daily habit, a good meal, an organized drawer. The whole concept makes me want to get back into the habit of blogging.

We doubled the cayenne and the ginger in the original recipe. We added a dish of tofu stir-fried with garlic, shiitake mushrooms, carrots, scallions and sesame seeds. Quinoa, of course, and some baby kale. The flavors surprised us--equally delicious and unusual, absolutely worth making a place for on a regular basis. The meal was a joint effort, and goes to show how inspiration from  a talented friend not only makes pieces and parts of things find a home together, but also creates a whole much greater than the sum of its parts.