I love a clean, well-organized desk with just one item in front of me; truthfully, I am nearly obsessive about it. However, every once in a while, if I am tackling a very difficult challenge, I will intentionally allow some mess to accumulate.
For example, I am currently taking a Philosophy of Mind Course via the University of Oxford’s Continuing Education Program, and over the past several days, trying to get a handle on the Descartes Mind-Body Problem, I started pulling out a variety of books, allowing them to stack up. Soon, as the photo above shows, my stack turned into a blob of books. Aaah!
But why?
Well, I think it is because the problem itself is a messy one, and to get my intellectual arms around it, I needed to become a little bit messy myself; I needed to reach into few different texts, physically spread them out a little, contrast and compare content, and simply play around a bit with ideas. (You see, The books are like building blocks, and just when you play with real building blocks, you have to tumble them out of the box first.)
Play. That’s right—play. As we know from childhood, real play—uninhibited play—is nearly always a little bit messy, and if there’s not some mess, then it may not be playing, it may be drudgery.
Anyway, I did turn the corner in my understanding of the Descartes Mind-Body Problem, and I suspect creating a little temporary mess on my desk and in my mind is what helped.