Sorting It Out

“Order is the only possibility of rest.”   -Wendell Berry

 

Yesterday I had the good sense to get out and walk after my 20-hour travel to Taipei and hooked back into my Audible book One Plus One by Jo Jo Moyes. (One of her best, I think!) Throughout the book, as a family meets difficulty after difficulty, the ever-optimistic Mom keeps saying “We’ll sort it out.”

 

I believe this is a British expression (the book takes place in England) and I rather like it. It suggests that when things go awry, it’s partially because they’re not in their proper place. Sorting it out is like the image in the fairy tales when the wicked queen gives the hero or heroine the task of sorting out different seeds thrown helter-skelter over the floor. Of course, an impossible task, but there always arrives help from some wounded bird that the hero or heroine befriended. Suggesting that though indeed we should pick up the tweezers and start making piles of the poppy and sesame and sunflower seeds, the final task often needs help from the world beyond mere will and sorting skills.

 

I believe that the act of sorting, starting with physical acts like cleaning your desk or organizing your files on the computer or arranging the tools in your tool chest, indeed brings satisfaction and clarity to our usually muddled minds. As Wendell Berry suggests above.

 

But the act goes further yet into the invisible or mental or emotional or metaphysical world. All polytheistic spiritual deities, from the Greek gods to the African orishas to the Catholic saints, are suggesting that all your petitions for help when you’re in dire straits shouldn’t be directed to the big guy in the sky. He has too much on his plate. Instead, direct it to the proper deputies she (or he) has appointed. First sort out your petition or prayer—fertility? Health? Wealth? Patience?— and then go to the oracle in charge. Sort out your need before you bother the spiritual world with your plea for assistance.

 

The same kind of thing is going on in the therapists’ office. You put your symptom out on the table and start to sort out what its probable cause might be. Your mother? Your relationship? Your childhood trauma? Your biorhythms? You and the therapist try to sort it out, as $150 an hour, thank you very much. Once you put a name to a condition, you have made the first step toward understanding it or remediating it or learning to live with it. Same is true for your visit to your medical doctor. 

 

Sorting doesn’t automatically cure anything, but by putting things in their proper perspective, we often can learn to adapt or change or even welcome what often in a backdoor way leads us to our gifts. We can rest more easily in the comforting arms of coherence. 

Indeed, that is one of the great gifts of the arts. Setting the actual content to the side, the mere ordering of sounds or movements or images or words that music, dance, visual arts or poetry achieves in the creative act is in and of itself a blessing. 

 

The very act of writing this post is my attempt to sort out my feelings about the term “sorting it out.” And now I can rest.