On Being Organized

“It was a mundane unraveling that could not be reversed, and therefore offered no opportunity to the storyteller: it belonged to the realm of disorder.”
—Atonement, Ian McEwan

Maybe it’s the process of moving.

Maybe it’s “transition shock.”

Sometimes I sense there is around the corner a fuller organized life. Each thing has its place. All is ordered, it rests. What you’re reading, whom you see and when, the people you’ve met that week, the books, the letters unanswered, a schedule that doesn’t need constant exceptions.

“Organize” is ultimately from the Greek órganon (ὄργανον), which meant all sorts of things: tools or parts, bodily organs and a musical instrument. Aristotle’s work on logic was posthumously called the Organon, because of a classical debate on whether logic was “part” of philosophy or only a tool. Roger Bacon called his influential work on the scientific method Novum Organon.

In desiring an organized life, we desire integration. We desire to fit into a whole — of friends, culture, the cosmos. We desire to fit not as parts but as partners, players, participants.

It is not moving. It’s not transition shock. It is the wound in the human heart that longs for resolution.

Josef Pieper describes this state of resolution in his essay “On Hope.” “One who has comprehended, encompassed, arrived, is no longer a viator [one on the way] but a comphensor.” This person has encompassed the goal, which is holiness, by being enfolded, encompassed in God. God is the one who encompasses all of life. He is its source and ground. He is the maker of the Many. He is wildness and order, Trinity and Maker of all things, many and one, part and whole. He is the Life.