A Simplified Life: How Order Brings Balance To Your Life

For many years, I seemed to live my life running from one problem to another, putting out fires. My business partner (who I later discovered, morphed into a malevolent narcissist while I wasn’t looking) took pleasure in handing problems off to me.

This I thought with some pride, was my responsibility: To fix things. Using my relationships and good faith promises to bail us out. Until no amount of water could put out the fire.

The inferno that took us out, was also what saved me. It's not that I wasn’t forewarned, scripture cautions us about “the pride of life.” Yet it was through that blistering inferno, I walked into the most wonderful lesson of my life; God makes beauty from ashes.

We have to give Him room to work.

It doesn’t always take catastrophe, but if it does, trust God, keep going and it will be alright in the end. As the saying goes, if it's not alright, it's not the end.

The truth that keeps emerging now is, there is a simple formula for staying the course. Because almost everything comes down to one thing, decision. The decision to keep what matters most first.

Through those years battling wars and fires, I would often look around my home and say to myself: “This is not what I want to represent me. This is not how I want to live!” The chaos that was churning in my business migrated to my home. It engulfed me there too, but I didn’t know how to change it.

I used to marvel at my best friend who always kept an immaculately organized home, even when she was nursing my newborn Godson Ryan. Just crossing the threshold felt calm and steadying. Long before Marie Kondo, I told Olivia she should teach people how to clean and organize. Something I could never quite pull off.

Until now.

During this seismic era of Covid-19 I have become addicted to organization. I look forward to going to bed each night and pray that I wake up to go at it one more day. There is something powerful and elevating about creating order. As I have been transforming my home, I too am being transformed. Consolidating the fragments of my life into a picture that makes sense to me now.

A place for everything and everything in its place. My time is organized and I am no longer hijacked by the tyranny of the urgent. I'm relentlessly telling myself, “that’s not what I’m doing now.”

Organization is the wealth secret that trumps all others. Without it you will spin your wheels and burn up your most precious and irreplaceable commodity: Time.

It's a foundational principle of a well lived life. Because to do anything well, you need clarity, focus and space to create.

So, if you find yourself constantly running and being “busy’ I would bet you are not taking care of what matters most. Only one thing is needed. To decide. Put first things first and never take for granted you can get to it tomorrow.

As the saying goes, tomorrow never comes.