"A clean room is the sign of a disturbed mind." — bumper sticker in the 1980’s
I’m currently reading A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman. Although we tend to think of being messy as a personal failure and cleaning as a source of stress, there are lots of times when we should celebrate chaos. Everything in balance, of course. You don’t want to spend hours filing, but you don’t want to have to risk death by being buried by a sudden avalanche of paperwork. The authors suggest that not only can less organization = less stress, but that it can free personal creativity.
They site as proof of their "less organization = less stress" theory not only in the notoriously messy Albert Einstein (you might have heard of him) but in the career of Sir Alexander Fleming (no relation to author Ian Fleming).
The Museum To Mess
There is an almost perfect replication of Sir Alexander Fleming’s laboratory in London, in the twists and turns of St. Mary’s Hospital. Stuff is everywhere — even test tubes laying around at random on their sides. Well, Fleming was a busy guy, what with being a chemist and all that. He just didn’t have the time to clean. He once even sneezed on a slide and looked at it under a microscope anyway … and discovered lysozyme, which is a mild antibiotic the body naturally produces in bodily fluids.
Fleming took a well deserved vacation in August of 1928. He hadn’t bothered to clean the lab, including many Petri dishes before he left. Less organization, less stress, remember? When he came back in September of 1928, some of the stuff in the petri dishes had a chance to party. Since he worked in a hospital, germs were most likely in the air carried past the wards into his lab.
He looked at one Petri dish and noticed a mold which one nasty little bacteria called staphylococci seemed to purposefully stay as far away from as possible. And what was that mold?
So, Don’t Get Carried Away With Cleanliness
(There were a little more technical details into the discovery of penicillin, as the Nobel Prize website shows, but the above story is a pretty good synopsis).
Oh, there are definitely times you need to throw out the trash and sort your mess into piles. But don’t let it take up most of your day (unless, of course, cleaning and professional organizing is your job). You have other things to do. If your home doesn’t stink to high heaven and you can run outside without falling over anything during a fire drill, then you are doing okay. But making sure each blade of grass on your lawn is a certain height is giving yourself too much to worry about.
The story goes that when Sir Alexander Fleming was given a tour of a sparkling clean, perfectly organized laboratory, he was told, "Just think of what you could have discovered in a place like this!"
"Not penicillin," he is said to have replied.
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16 Comments
Write a Comment»Interesting Idea. Thanks for the post!
You’re quite welcome, Ben. Thanks for taking the time to comment. There are a lot of interesting stress reduction suggestions in A Perfect Mess. Perhaps I’ll steal — er, I mean, include some more of those suggestions in a future post.
i didnt know that, sir fleming discovered penicillin in that way.. good post
I feel more relaxed already!
Sweet idea!
I liked the screaming idea a little bit more though 
great idea
I find this idea very interesting. The funny thing is that I have a blog about closet organizing I do admit I might be a little bit of a neat freak, but it does stress me out at times. I will defiantly read this book, hopefully it can help me live a less stressful life. Thanks for recommending this book, I will let you know how it affected me.
I am naturally messy. Although putting things in their place does help in terms of efficiency a lot of the time.
Thanks for the encouraging post I am quite a disorderly person and that helps me a lot to keep free from stress.
There is a lot of time we should celebrate chaos. That is a really nice line, and the overall jist. Thanks.
I feel this idea oppose against public opinion in our society. But this very attractive for me, because I’m include in lazy people category to clean the house, even my own house..!
Nice post. I completely agree with this findings. I am at my peak of creativity in messy surroundings. The more we try to bring order in our lives, the less spontaneous we become and in the process we lose some of our creativity.
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Penicillin huh? I’m allergic to Penicillin. Haha, good post though.
That may or may not true, but you can definitely overdo messiness. There’s a difference between organized chaos and just plain chaos.
Exactly, the more obsessed we are with cleanliness, the more stressful we become. I have to agree that less organization = less stress….