My Obsession with Order

About a year ago I became obsessed with bringing order to my life, an order that was descendent of monks and Ben Franklin’s daily schedule in his autobiography.  I was jealous of their ability to schedule themselves so rigorously, and I thought I would excel under that kind of management….in an ideal world.  A world that only had one person in it, me!

Fortunately that is not the case.  I am with other people, in community, and a selfishly down to 15 minute intervals schedule doesn’t last too long when you are married and have a job and are in graduate school.

I have been reading Jon M. Sweeney’s Cloister Talks: Learning from My Friends the Monks, and the book has done a fine job of both reminding me of the essence of order and how the cloistered life is not to be imitated by the family life.  Both are sacraments, and both carry their blessings and difficulties.  Both are considered of the utmost holiness.  I desire order, but what I have been learning as I read is that macro-order is more important than micro-order.  Where my old schedule used to say something like: Wake Up, shower, read, breakfast, pray with fifteen minute intervals marked like a checklist I am trying to bring more order to my life by deciding to not do certain things for the sake of order and allow freedom in the different segments.  To go with the seasons, I have talked to my wife about having certain "orderly" goals like: we cannot turn the TV on, for a movie or a show, until it is completely dark outside.  We should be outside enjoying the weather, cooking, eating, walking, or reading outside.  We will have time to be inside once it is dark.  But until then, we will not do anything that can detract from our enjoyment, liesure, and play after a day of working inside.

I am confident that this is a much more mature approach to the family economy than the rigorous scheduling I have attempted in the past.  Even if I had gotten it to work it would have been obliterated once we have a child.  I must be honest with my vocation in a family cultivating the fruits of both garden and Spirit to be mindful and orderly in how I go about each day, while at the same time never missing the richness of this world and our delight in it for the deceptively inticing false pleasure that comes from controlling everything so that it becomes your own world.

An aside: I have three chapters left in Cloister Talks and will be posting a review (fingers-crossed) tomorrow.