SOUL FOOD:Organizing our messy lives

I nearly missed it. If it hadn’t been for a CBS Sunday Morning segment late in the month, I would have. January was Get Organized Month.

Makes sense. Getting organized is one of the top five New Year’s resolutions people make, according to the National Assn. of Professional Organizers, which christened January Get Organized Month.

In light of the occasion, Sunday Morning correspondent Bill Geist took viewers on a tour of the offices of some of the CBS News staff. Science writer David H. Freeman, co-author of “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder,” tagged along with him.

Martha Teichner, Charles Osgood, Andy Rooney, emerged, one by one, from behind great piles of papers, paraphernalia, beverages and snacks. In their offices, by varying degrees, it was difficult to distinguish counters from cabinets, cabinets from desks and, in some cases, desks from floors.

Heaps of stuff camouflaged them all. Useful messes by Freeman’s assessment, receiving nods of his approval.

You see, the premise of Freeman’s book is this: moderately messy systems can lead to strokes of brilliance. (For example, the bloom of mold we know as the source of penicillin was a by-product, not of Alexander Fleming’s carefully organized genius, but of his chronic untidiness.)

Not that anyone at CBS News has had a recent lifesaving scientific breakthrough. But they do — don’t they? — bring us the news with keen insight and wit, time and time again.

Only at the door of Phil Chin’s office did Freeman finally falter. Surveying the mountainous landscape of stuff, he turned to Geist and confessed, “I try not to be judgmental about other people, but I am tempted to say that maybe this is getting a little out of control.”

Maybe. Maybe Chin overshot the operative word, “moderate,” in Freeman’s equation.

But if, as lore has it, one man’s trash can be another man’s treasure, why can’t one man’s mega-mess be another man’s moderate? Who’s to say when someone’s stuff becomes not a useful “perfect mess” but too much?

At what point does a perfect mess unravel? One file folder too many? One too many dirty coffee mugs?

Oblivious to Get Organized Month, I had nonetheless been reading through Kathryn Porter’s book, “Too Much Stuff: De-cluttering Your Heart and Home.” While hardly judgmental in the condemnatory sense of the word, Porter does have a different take on messes than Freeman — at least when it comes to messy homes.

There, she believes, clutter can stifle our physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health, not to mention its knack for putting the kibosh on relationships.

Straightforward and deceptively simple in its detailed tips and advice, “Too Much Stuff” reads like an antithesis to the meandering and philosophical “A Perfect Mess.”

Porter is a self-described (although reformed) fourth-generation clutter bug. Now a member of the National Assn. Of Professional Organizers and the National Study Group on Chronic Disorganization, she offers a faith-based message about how to de-clutter and then maintain a clutter-free heart and home.

Her story is personal, unflinchingly honest, and engaging from the get-go. At the risk of sounding corny, I’m going to tell you it’s inspirational. (And I am, I think, harder than most to inspire.)

“Too Much Stuff” begins with Porter’s own story (Chapter 1: My Story) and also ends with it (Epilogue: The Dirt On Me).

The book’s prologue, titled, “The Ultimate Cost of Clutter,” tenderly recounts the death of Porter’s packrat mother. “How,” she wonders, “do you tell someone your mother was suffocated by a house filled with waist-high clutter?”

The suffocation is both figurative and all too literal. In a final emergency wrought from the complications of diabetes, paramedics could not clear the clutter quickly enough to reach Porter’s 57-year-old mother in time.

“Boxes, bags, trash, and debris were everywhere,” Porter writes, “three- to 4-feet high in many places. A narrow pathway carved a trail from the front door to the couch that became [her] deathbed. A layer of vomit lined the clutter by the couch.”

As Porter sorted through her mother’s things following her death, she came face to face with a truth she had until then avoided. “I am,” she realized at that point, “my mother’s daughter.”

Between the book’s prologue and epilogue, Porter shares what she learned during her own escape from clutter. First and foremost are her mantras.

One: “The most beautiful treasures filling our homes are not our possessions, but the people who live with us. The other Porter gleaned early on from a woman at her church named Jan: “You can’t keep everything and keep a clean house.”

For Porter these were magic words. In them is a truth that set her free.

As those words freed her, she hopes they will free her readers. Through them she learned it’s OK to get rid of nice gifts she will never use. It’s OK to toss the boxes, the wrapping paper, tissue and ribbon — things her mother, her grandmother and her great-grandmother always carefully saved.

Chapter by chapter Porter leads the reader with a gentle heart and hand, much as her friend Jan and another friend, Holly, once led her. From the general (What is clutter?) to the specific (How many towels, how many pairs of jeans, how many pairs of socks do you really need?) Porter forges the way.

Chapter 2, “First Things First: Define Clutter” lays down the basics. Porter does pull out the old chestnut about one person’s trash being another person’s treasure -- but with an immediate caveat: “There are some things that are just plain trash.” (That McDonald’s bag with the used burger wrapper setting on the kitchen counter, for instance.)

Aside from that, she gives examples, such as unfinished projects (the front, back and sleeves of the sweater I knitted for my husband 19 years ago but never joined together qualifies) and obsolete things -- say, a pre-Pentium computer used as a doorstop, kept because it cost $4,000 when it was new.

Porter identifies 11 categories of clutter, not all of them material. There’s financial clutter (a.k.a. credit card debt), activity clutter (overbooked calendars), conversational clutter (gossip and profanity) and the clutter of the heart (think bitterness, anger, envy, worry, pride, unhealthy relationships or anxiety).

Each chapter ends with spiritual exercises to help de-clutter the heart (“Lord, forgive me for:”, “Lord, thank you for:”, and “Lord, help me with:”) and questions to help with de-cluttering the home (“In what room will I start?”, “In what ways do I place inflated value on my possessions?”).

With its faith-based perspective, the 167-page book remains a down-to-earth guide to owning your possessions instead of them owning you. It reads like a conversation with a wise and caring friend.