"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?

Penicillin.

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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