I suffer from piles

I suffer from piles.

There. I've said it. It's not a complaint we like to discuss, but I'm opening up here, in the hope of finding support from fellow sufferers.

There are piles of paper on the desk. There are piles of magazines, and catalogues, and junk mail, and more paper on the bookcase in the hallway. There is a pile of books on my bedside cabinet. There's a pile of coins and receipts on my bedroom window sill. There's a pile of laundry on my bed. There's a pile of ironing in the kitchen. There's a pile of clean washing outside each child's bedroom door (the rule is, they put it away). There's another pile of papers on the kitchen window sill.

Every now and again I have an attack on the piles, and get rid of them. But they grow back.

I aspire to a minimalist house, where there's a place for everything, and everything has its place. Everything is away, out of sight, or tidily arranged and decorative. But I've been aspiring for several years... decades... and I think I've just got to accept that I'm just not a minimalist. How do you minimalists do it? Do you spend hours a day wandering through your clean lines homes, admiring the grey and white colour scheme, and pouncing on every stray item with lioness alacrity, before settling down to your hour of solitary evening meditation? Did you go to minimalist training school, where they rooted out all your cluttery habits, teaching you better, sleeker ways of living? Or were you born so strongly minimalist that you were able to resist the onslaught of untidiness and disorder? Perhaps you just have a lot of visitors, and therefore a high incentive to keep your house looking lovely.

I have come to the conclusion that, for me, an alternative strategy is more realistic. Instead of trying to fit my square peg self into a round minimalist hole (it would be round, wouldn't it? No sharp corners or edges, just a perfect smooth circle), I think I need to learn to love my inability to keep the anarchy of the piles at bay. I must accept that flat surfaces, of their very nature, attract things being left on top of them. I mean, at least the chaos is in piles, and not just strewn randomly around. I should learn to understand a pile of stuff not as a failing in tidiness, but as a beautiful demonstration of a busy life. I should look around and see a cosy, relaxed home, where items are able to find their own space and chill out, without fear of being hustled out of sight into an unwelcoming cupboard or drawer, or - worse still - the recycling.

Or I need to make the acquaintance of the piles fairy. How do I do that?

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