Wednesday November 1, 2006
Order out of chaos
Over a period of three weeks, our granddaughter learned to organize things.
Perhaps all children go through this same phase, at about the same time. To me, it is still a miracle.
When granddaughter Katherine visited us at the beginning of October, she assembled those Lego-like Megablocks at random. If two blocks would jam together, that was good enough for her.
Her efforts to build a house, a tower, or a car bore a striking resemblance to an autowrecker\’s junkyard with battered car bodies teetering precariously on top of each other, waiting to fall down.
Which Katherine\’s constructions usually did.
Three weeks later, though, she had taught herself to organize the pieces by size. When she assembled a tree house, she carefully fitted together a base of the bigger blocks with eight pins each. On top of that, she built a tower of four-pin blocks, neatly aligned, sides perfectly matching.
No one taught her to do this. It was her own discovery.
Development process
I have not read anything about when this aptitude for organization normally develops. Some who look at my office might contend that it never does. Because I typically have piles of paper all over my desk. My workshop, similarly, tends to have tools almost anywhere.
But that misses the point. What I organize is ideas, and the words used to express those ideas. I cannot organize people, pieces of paper, financial plans, or cats.
My wife Joan organizes hundreds of little spools of embroidery thread so that she can find the exact shade she needs in seconds. Our daughter Sharon, Katherine\’s mother, seems to organize pieces of quilting fabric by color, texture, size, and fibre. But neither Joan nor I can figure out any organizing principle in Sharon\’s food pantry.
Everyone organizes things in different ways. But everyone, I think, does organize things.
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It seems to be a characteristic of being human. Each in our own way, we attempt to impose order on chaos. We create categories and classes; we divide things into groups; we give those groups names and identities. Chemistry depends on its table of elements; biology on its system of genus and species.
It may be a uniquely human characteristic. Whales and elephants have bigger brains than we do. But as far as I know, they don\’t line up according to height, weight, or age. They don\’t arrange pebbles by color or mineral. If they have evolved a Michelin Guide to Five-Star Feeding Places, they haven\’t published it.
But we do it constantly.
It makes me wonder if the story of creation in Genesis, the opening chapters of the Bible, is more about us than about God. In the beginning, it says, there was nothing but chaos. But out of chaos came order – night and day, land and water, plants and birds and animals, and humans who named things.
Perhaps that was our need. And we told the story to validate our own compulsion to organize.
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Copyright © 2006 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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