As I took Rufus out this evening for his “good-night” pee, I was reminded of why I love Autumn so much: the crisp air, how it stings my cheeks hot from being inside, the aroma of wood smoke. The owls hooted. A possum trundled through the dry leaves in the creek bed near the house. Squirrels shook acorns from the trees, the nuts rat-a-tat-tatting on the street like bullets. The acorn caps crunched beneath our feet as Rufus left his calling card in the usual spots. Other dogs in the neighborhood howled at the night sky. It’s flannel pajama and shearling slipper weather. The cats curl up to sleep in their baskets lined with blankets and fleeces. I’m most content and feel most alive at this time of year.

The summer before we bought a kayak for our place in Hilton Head, we joined a half-day kayak outing on Broad Creek. Our guide, Carlos, said he strove to live in perpetual summer. He came up to Hilton Head for the warm months in the Northern Hemisphere and returned to Costa Rica for summertime in the Southern Hemisphere. I always think of him as Carlos of perpetual summer.
I wonder where I would need to go to live in perpetual autumn?

In 2005, I was still providing on-site organizing consultations to homeowners and micro-businesses. If you’re not clear on what I mean by “organizing consultations”, it’s just a fancy term for creating systems for managing paper and stuff. Many of the micro-business clients had one goal in mind — they wanted a desktop free of tchotchkes and papers and anything else that would create the appearance of barely controlled chaos.

They wanted, instead, to be transformed into poster people for empty desks — the signature sign of a clear, uncluttered mind, a person in control of their working life, everything humming along like clockwork. Many felt that their career climbs were stalled by the state of their desks. Many had naturally neatnik supervisors.

I would listen to their goals and work flow descriptions, count the number of interruptions and disruptions that occurred within the next 30 minutes, observe their paper and task shuffling habits, and think to myself, “ay carumba.”

It wasn’t my role, however, to judge their goals. The expectation was that I would show them how to handle steps a, b, and, c. That expectation is particularly powerful with those who are ashamed and confused by their messy surroundings, and can be a huge undertaking to reset. We have to pick our battles.

The irony for many of these empty deskers was that they were innately very good paper pilers. They knew their stacks from the bottom up — what folder supported the bottom, what folders napped in the middle. It may not look pretty, but they knew in what stack and what spot in said stack to look for a contract that had been signed in 2002.

Luckily, the organizing industry is recognizing that keeping almost all paper out of sight, filed away in drawers, creates too much stress for some people, and that ignoring the anxieties caused by out-of-sight-out-of-mind creates a bigger obstacles to successful resolutions than the client (and often the consultant) like to admit. It’s also beginning to more openly embrace the ample evidence that people often have unique ways of organizing themselves and their memory, including their ability to cement in memory what’s in the stacks lining the top of their credenzas.

So, I’m very pleased to see that the marketplace now offers more products designed not to banish piles of paper, but to help people be more adept and efficient pilers. Pendaflex appears to be leading the way in this area with products from their PileSmart line that includes a double angled tray and dividers with reusable tabs on two sides and binder clips that can be labeled.

I’m not an affiliate of this company or an official spokesperson in any capacity. But I’m a big fan of those binder clips, because although I’m perfectly capable of filing and do so at regular intervals, there are always some folders I want out in plain sight, in a tidy-ish pile, on top of my desk, next to the Paddywax candle; the Tibetan singing bowl; the stapler; the phone; the labelmaker; the basket containing business cards, black ink cartridge, i-Pod charger, and a book of matches; the stack of books I frequently reference or am in the process of reading. There’s also a lamp, a printer, a ream of printer paper, my watch, and the various notebooks in which I scribble and brainstorm and ruminate.

It’s a busy desk.

It’s exactly the way I want it to be, binder-clipped piles and tchotchkes and all.

There are freelancers/solopreneurs who relish the luxury of being pajama clad whenever and however long they like. There are those who don’t.

Me, I’m somewhere in between. I’m often in my PJ’s until noon. I don’t plan this per se, but it just happens. I get busy. Showers and dressing are a disruption unless I’ve reached a logical stopping point with whatever I’m working on, OR I’ve reached my pajama boundary, the point at which the pajamas morph from comfort clothes to disgusting. It’s the point where my brain becomes pajamaed, too. My ability to focus is shot and the only remedy is to clean up and put on street clothes. Being aware of this boundary has been useful. What’s been even more helpful than noticing it, though, is acting upon it.

Although Hugh Hefner carries off his signature pajamas-as- daywear with aplomb, for some the routine of working, eating, and sleeping in one’s pajamas can signify what’s least likable about being a home based freelancer : nowhere to go, no one to see, no one who will be seeing them. Being alone turns into a prison, an ordeal of solitude, a complete drag, a perfect reason to return to the world of cubicles and corner offices and water cooler gossip and break room politics. When solitude becomes a straight jacket, being a freelancer is neither fun nor functional.

Eons ago my father worked as an independent consultant. From day one, however, he adhered to the same morning routine as he would have if he worked for someone else. Rise at 5 AM. Morning jog. Bowl of cereal. Read newspaper. Shower. Shave. Dress. Fill coffee mug. At his desk by 8 AM.

My father credited the structure of this regimen for keeping him productive within the walls of his home office and ever free to leave the confines of his office. If the opportunity to network or have a lunch meeting arose unexpectedly, he was prepared. If you’re dressed to walk out the door, he would say, you’re more likely to do just that. It’s simple enough but not simplistic.

Dad had a point.

He might have been pontificating to bored, dismissive, incredulous ears (yes, mine…I was in my teens) at the time, but he gets full credit and high-ho’s now.

Score: Dad 1, Snark 0.

Note:  This post came out of a project called Thirty Voices, for which nearly thirty women in their thirties living in various parts of the world wrote about various themes over the course of a year.  I don’t remember the theme that triggered this piece. I forgot to keep notes.  But I do recall that water and trees were very much on my mind during the autumn of 2007.

In a post I wrote in August, I described drought induced water restrictions in Atlanta. At the time, we were in a severe or extreme drought. Now, they call it a “hundred year” drought, a term with a decidedly biblical ring to it

As a metro area Atlanta has about 5 million people, and the numbers keep climbing. As with most boom towns, the number of people quickly out-calibrated the capacity of the infrastructure, and our water supply is no exception.

We are told that we may run out of drinking water in 90 days and water for other uses about 30 days thereafter. Even though that end date is not far off, it’s hard to fathom 5 million people unable to drink, shower, clean or flush.

The ticker tape at the bottom of our newscasts offers drought related information — much of which isn’t new, although I was piqued by the announcement I saw last night that neighbors are beginning to report on their ban-violating neighbors. Believe it or not, despite the warnings, car washes are still operating. Conventions are being held (imagine all the extra glasses of water, showers, flushes, etc. that even one mid-sized conference entails), life in many ways is carried on status quo.

Yet, life is also beginning to take on an acrid smell, as if the sleeve of our polyester shirt is singed and has begun to smoke. We are cells dividing into smaller, damaged cells.

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“Be a Communist, a stamp collector, or a Ladies’ Aid worker if you must,” advised Marjorie Hillis in her 1936 bestseller, Live Alone And Like It, “but for heaven’s sake, be something.”

Today, a writer might overkill such a remark with an exclamation point. (It doesn’t need one!) Miss Hillis, however, was from a different time, although the advice she gives in her guide for single women is refreshingly frank, her opinions are CEO firm, and her perspectives are surprisingly modern and pragmatic.

Coco Chanel had a different view. “How many cares one loses,” she said, “when one decides not to be something but to be someone.” A woman who challenged the wearing of corsets, it’s no surprise she questioned the wearing of other assumptions.

I bring this up as part of a larger reflection on how many of us discover a tendency to define ourselves by our occupation. We are, in this thought pattern, what we do for a living; our jobs explain both our who and our what.

It’s a limited definition, just one part of a bigger, richer picture. We are also defined by how we respond to deaths in the family, our decision to lead a fundraising committee for the city dog park, the from-the-hip thoughts we record in our journals, the water temperature at which we most enjoy swimming.

It’s time to claim it all, I say, the whole shebang of who we are.