I’ve been working on all of my integrity issues, making progress every week, except a month ago I went crazy on my promise to clean my desk (which was a bit like excavating Pompei) and then back-slid—so, now I’m totally out of integrity because part of my integrity statement was to get my desk clean and keep it clean. Within two weeks, the ashes of Pompei began to drift back.
I don’t think I spent enough time taking a good look at how I create a mess in the first place. I suspect I “went crazy” just to produce a result that would satisfy my idea of what the desks of “good” people look like, without giving much thought to what I deal with, or even what happens when the third piece of paper takes out a mortgage on my desk real estate.
This third-paper thought borrows obliquely from the “dancing guy as leader” video, where three people dancing gives permission for everyone to dance. The thought is probably closer to the practice of the D.C. Metro of cleaning up any graffiti on a car every night before letting it back on the tracks in order to avoid having “I’m da bomb” or “Disco Dan” lead other people to spontaneously think “What a good idea! Where’s my Magic Marker?”
Now I’m asking myself questions about how all of this occurs for me (how the desk occurs, how my work occurs, how I occur to myself) in an attempt to see something new. I might have to confront the state of my desk as a symptom of a wider dysfunctional system–like “I don’t feel like it” means I’m entitled to break my word to myself?