Make a mess, keep it tidy

Microprinciples are potentially annoying to those seeking the capital-T Truth about making. Sometimes they Dad you headlong into a direction. Sometimes they are your Mom sitting shotgun, gasping for the brakes. This is because making isn’t one thing, it’s an oscillation between two.

You must make a mess. Ask a God, everything about creation is messy. First you must create the universe (a total slog), then wait an eon to make a cell, another for a spine, and two shakes for a bipedal ape to unearth, crush, combine, and conjure the lot into the system of language, glass, and electrons upon which you read this note. Nature is all mess. If you don’t believe it, go watch a mammalian birth or stick a microscope in your garden.

And you must keep it tidy. Spare the rod, spoil the craft. Makings must be sorted, darlings slain. You murder your first born ideas to make room for gifted ones. You are learning to discern and improving your taste. You choose fewer, better things. Nature does this automatically through a process called death. Every autumn the leaves step off the ledge and make room for a new season of mess.

The shampoo bottle says lather, rinse, repeat. It leaves out the part where you must live a life worthy of examination and perish from this Earth. All making is an oscillation between the chaos of suds and the swirl lost down the drain.