To Hang or Not to Hang

Let’s talk closets. Some of you are really organized with your stuff. I have one friend who color codes everything so even in storage his stuff looks nice. His clothes are hung according to the color spectrum and his shoes are lined up neatly across the floor below complimentary colors and patterns. He doesn’t even have closet doors, heck; he doesn’t need them because his closet is a work of art.

Then there’s my best friend’s closet. She tries to get things onto hangers, sometimes facing the same direction, often holding more than one item for the sake of saving space. Of course her closet isn’t filled with all the lovely hues of the rainbow because she figured out long ago that by wearing only black she could save a lot of time getting dressed in the morning. Sometimes things are slung across the foot of the bed, or a chair, or thrown randomly over the rod to get them off the floor.

Now let’s say these two friends decide to live together in a house that has only one closet. They are in love and agree that this is his half and that is hers, and as in the beginning of most things, they laugh at each other’s closet idiosyncrasies. Each secretly believes the other will eventually see the error of their ways and come around to doing things the right way. Umm. Yeah. Not gonna happen.

Something else happens. They begin to take the way the other takes care of their half of the closet like a personal insult, like one is doing something to the other. They forget that this is how their closets have always been, and neither is doing anything any differently than they ever have just to be spiteful. She isn’t disrespecting him by throwing her clothes on the floor, anymore than he’s trying to control her with his color coding. This is how their closets have always been; it has nothing to do with the other person, AT ALL!

These are just closets. Think about it. An orderly closet is no more divine than a messy one; it’s merely an outward reflection of an internal process. Life is way more complicated than closets. Then again, maybe it isn’t.