Order amid today’s clutter

WE cannot deny that today’s clutter has grown a lot more than in the previous generations. It has gone ballistic and viral, as they say, because the clutter mentality is highly contagious. It has become something like an epidemic. There are just too many things around, small and big, ordinary and very important. You look around, and almost always that’s what you see—clutter.

This is not only in the field of the material and the physical. More serious than that is the mental clutter which can betray an even deeper disorder. Many of us are so overloaded with data and pieces of information, with plans and concerns, often without connection with each other, that they would not know anymore what to do with them.

If ever there is some concern for order, it is often pegged on shallow and highly ephemeral reasons if not self-serving motives. Today’s idea of order does not go much further than mere window-dressing or sweeping things under the rug.

Because of this, we also see a lot of waste around. Recycling waste helps very little, since what is recycled goes back to the vicious cycle of producing too many things that often are just junks. We need to examine more closely the wisdom behind recycling, since whatever economic and ecological benefits recycling can achieve may already be outweighed by its contribution to the vicious cycle.

Anyway, there are many other bad consequences of clutter and disorder. We would not know, for example, which task to do first, since our sense of priority would already have gone haywire.

We would be prone to give knee-jerk reactions, and raw, unprocessed responses to things and events. We would easily be at the mercy of passing conditionings, fads and trends. We become forgetful of many things. We can develop the vices of improvisations, shallow and narrow-minded considerations, precipitated actions that often show rash judgments and lack of thoughtfulness.

We need to launch a big campaign to reinstall the sense of order in everyone. It seems this virtue has been taken for granted. And people do not know anymore the value of order, nor its basis and purpose, and much less the ways to live it.

Some techniques at keeping order, of course, are helpful. The habit of acting on things immediately without unnecessary delay is one of them. Keeping schedules and knowing to put things in their proper places is another. Making plans or thinking ahead before acting is still another.

But all these techniques can only go so far. What is most basic about this whole business about order is to know where order starts from. We just should not content ourselves with our own idea of order. That would often lead to a certain and subtle form of disorder sooner or later.

We need to understand that order starts always with God, and is kept and developed properly with him. After all, God is our Creator and supreme lawgiver, who maintains everything in order, not only physical and worldly order, but also and more importantly, moral and spiritual order. Outside of him, there can only be disorder that unavoidably causes clutter.

This is a very important consideration because many times our idea of order is based only on some worldly values like efficiency, effectiveness, profitability, convenience, aesthetics, etc. These obviously have their importance, but if not founded on God and his laws, these can only give us a false or incomplete if not deceptive sense of order.

We have to disabuse ourselves from the thought that God has nothing to do with our duty to keep order and avoid clutter. Or that God can only get in the way of our work and pursuits for order. Or that his requirements and conditions for order are too idealistic and are undoable.

These have no basis at all. If there’s anyone who is most interested in order, and knows how to achieve it, what it involves, who enables us to live and develop it, etc., it is God. He even expands our idea of order to include not only physical and worldly order but also spiritual and moral order.

It is an order that would bring us to our eternal life, and not just something pragmatic that no matter how useful will only have a shelf life. A God-inspired sense of order will always make use of whatever human, natural and worldly criteria of order there are, but will purify and elevate them to the supernatural level where our destiny is.

We have to be vitally united with God if we need to live order amid today’s clutter.