I believe that a sufficiently well-described mess will begin to organize itself, in the presence of any thoughtful person. (2026mar8)
this was originally a bit of a joke, but i also knew when joking that i was going to want to revisit this (joke about outcomes you want), and sure enough, the concept has been growing on me over time. i found myself mentioning it in my latest wordvomit, which was reason enough for me to want to turn the tweet into a blogpost.
sort my notes with me (2024sep, archives)
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2024dec25 one thing to consider is that my best tweets are more resonant than most of my blogposts, so if I were looking to reorganize my blogposts it would make sense to go through my saved and highlighted tweets. I know I have a tumblr post with some highlighted bits… 2024 highlights as of nov13.
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(2024dec16) Messes are clutters not just of things, but of intentions. That’s what really makes them difficult to tidy.
If you didn’t have a clutter of intentions then it quickly becomes obvious what’s relevant and what’s not, and eliminating the irrelevant should be straightforward.
So to state the “obvious” (which is easy to lose sight of when you’re deep in the middle of a mess) – one of the best things you can do when trying to tidy a mess is to ask questions like “what is the purpose of this space?”
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(2024dec18) MESS In 2022, on my second trip to San Francisco I was once eating a sandwich on a bench when I noticed a troubled woman some distance away across the street. She was rummaging through a large plastic bag of her belongings. if you were there you’d probably infer as I did that she was probably homeless, maybe mentally ill, maybe having some kind of episode, maybe on drugs. She didn’t seem like a threat to anyone. Rather she was in a very piteous state. The bag was torn, so she was struggling- not just figuratively- to keep her shit together. It was a sorry sight. I remember just an hour earlier I had been enraptured marveling at the beauty of nature, revelling in the kinship of my friends, and now I was brought back to earth by the sight of human suffering. And I know, there are a lot of people who have it worse than she does, maybe even in her immediate vicinity. I remember my first real shock was when I was a kid visiting India with my family for the first time, around the age of 7. I had grown up in Singapore, which was squeaky-clean, orderly… But there was something about that experience for me personally that was really striking.
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