Organization Isn't Everything

The painter Edgar Degas, who also wrote poetry, once complained to his friend, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, that he had plenty of ideas for poems but couldn’t seem to write them. Mallarmé replied, “But my dear Degas, poems aren’t made with ideas, but with words.”

It’s a useful story for our age of AI, when people seem to think the role of humans is simply to catch free-floating ideas (I see you, Rick Rubin) and let computers do the rest. I recently saw an ad for Suno, an AI music generator, that read: “I have so many ideas for songs, but have trouble hearing them.” Well, if you can’t hear your music, it doesn’t exist yet.

This lesson goes beyond art and AI. The meaning of our lives is found not in floating above reality but in wrestling with what’s in front of us: our clumsy fingers on the guitar, our clumsy words as we try to express ourselves, our clumsy attempts to understand this human life. Meaning isn’t born from ideas alone. It emerges in the struggle to give them form.

Many people come to my coaching because they feel scattered or unfocused. And yes, living in chaos is exhausting! But raised on corporate ideals of productivity and efficiency, many of us have come to believe that a good life is simply a matter of finding the right system.

Organization is a human need, but it’s one among many. The chaos we feel inside is often not a failure of planning, but the result of parts of ourselves we’ve spent years ignoring, suppressing, or exiling. As James Baldwin wrote, “Nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Too often, we use organization to avoid facing ourselves.

So I’ll say it plainly: I don’t care whether you made your bed this morning or stuck to your diet. I care whether you’re becoming the fullest version of yourself. When I see your inner conflicts, I don’t see a productivity problem. I see an invitation to bring exiled parts of you back into relationship, to discover something marvelous no algorithm could predict.

As always, if you’d like to be held through your own process, contact me and we’ll set up a free sample coaching call.

Remedios Varo, "The Creation Of The Birds" (1959)