Junk drawer’s remedial power
GOOD news can come from unlikely places and the latest bit to give your Saturday a lift, is that your junk drawer may in fact be saving your mental health.
As I’ve long suspected, even if an ordered environment breeds mental calm (and chaos around you fuels inner turmoil) being part of that nearuniversal club of “people with seriously messed-up junk drawers” turns out to be good for you.
I reckon having a chaotic junk drawer is a basic human right and an Aussie institution.
I’m pretty sure there was even a junk drawer in that historic shack where Ned Kelly lived as a kid with his family and when they restore it, as it’s just been announced they will, I hope that special spot where the Kellys kept their spare bits of iron, rivets and old horse shoes gets included.
If you need it explained what a junk drawer is, I feel sorry for you.
As we know, it’s that place where all the stuff with no place to go ends up perfectly at home.
A reel of white cotton with a needle stuck through it, a couple of old nappy pins and a whistle on a string stored with a partially withered tube of Super Glue inside a cup with a missing handle awaiting repair makes perfect sense in the junk drawer.
No home is complete without one and the usual rules about chaos management do not apply. It’s the place where the mess can be unlimited as long as the damn thing closes.
It may look like a random collection of unrelated crap — from box cutters to string, batteries, shoelaces, white ink, duct tape, tiny screwdrivers every kind of battery, loose buttons and picture hooks, puncture kits and sandwich bags full of handfuls of rubber bands or rescued unstamped stamps still stuck to that bit of the envelope you ripped them from — but it is a place where the lack of a system is the system and everything never has to be in its place.
You know that cool-looking but never used wine bottle foil-cutter thing you got for your 21st or that umpteenth “waiter’s friend” that has strayed into the house? Straight to the junk drawer for them. They so have their own spot waiting.
The junk drawer has special powers. You could spend two hours looking for a size 10 missing shoe by forensically pulling apart the entire house and still not find it, but you can find the spare, tiny battery for the bathroom scales in the back left corner of the junk drawer in a split second. The junk drawer just works.
I was beyond happy when I received a list of topics for a recent panel chat on the Today Show and found “Be proud of your ‘junk drawer’, it’s helping you stay sane” on the bottom of the list.
There were serious topics above it, but the junk drawer should have been at the top because it has far more potential to solve problems than analysing Nick Kyrgios’s latest meltdown or whether Mel C is right that girl groups are getting too sexed-up.
The hook for that topic — which tragically fell off the list due to a late run by Melania Trump — was that the author of the hit book The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin, had declared that the exception to her rule about keeping things manageable around you to ensure a happy life was the universal junk drawer. Rubin is so heavily into outward calm that she even keeps an empty shelf, and she “loves” that empty shelf; it’s full of potential to fill it with happy things (or be left empty because the clear space is comforting).
But she has taken the advice of a friend who suggested “it’s also important to have time for serendipity, for the unexpected — to make room for a little messiness in our lives”.
OK, Rubin clearly does not live with two teenage boys, an adult male and two kelpies, because if she did she’d know “a little messiness” doesn’t require an invitation or space to be made. It has its own key.
That aside, I’m glad that even though her mantra is “if (people) get control of their stuff, they feel more in command of their lives”, Ruben can see that the madness of the junk drawer provides balance to that idealised and ordered world we are constantly striving to make happen around us.
The junk drawer is the neat wardrobe or pantry’s evil twin.
As a remedy to and a gloriously unmanageable pressure valve for a world with far too many Ned Kelly’s armour-style rules and regulations, I would be lost without it.
NO HOME IS COMPLETE WITHOUT ONE AND THE USUAL RULES ABOUT CHAOS MANAGEMENT DO NOT APPLY