Decluttering office opens new venture
I was in the air. Flying home. Crammed against the passenger next to me, I noticed she was reading “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” From the title alone, I knew I wanted some of that life-changing magic even if I had to tidy up to get it.
By the time I got home, I had decided to clean out my home office — no matter that it was December and the holidays were hard upon us. I began with a vengeance.
It’d been two years since I’d finished my doctoral dissertation at UTC on the early days of Chattanooga’s revitalization, and I still had papers stacked and scattered on my desk — transcripts of interviews, copies of articles, folders, documents, books with pages marked and multiple versions of my manuscript. The mess acted like a clog in a drain. My life couldn’t move forward until all this was flushed.
It’s easy to toss the obvious things like handwritten notes you can barely decipher or multiple copies of things. But then it gets serious — you have to handle every piece of paper in order to decide what to do. Some of it was important, even if I didn’t need it anymore. If it had served me when I was doing research, maybe it would be useful to someone else.
Would anyone ever want to research Chattanooga Venture or Chattanooga in the 1980s? Probably no one currently in Chattanooga, I thought. They were too busy creating the next decade, not reviewing the past.
Besides, we can’t agree on our past anyway. Everyone has a different version of it. When people tell the story of what happened in Chattanooga, I’ve noticed they always start when they entered the picture. That makes sense — your story begins with you.
The same is true for me. I always start the story with the
day I came home one summer, thinking it was just for a visit, and attended a concert downtown on a vacant lot. B.B. King, the “King of the Blues” was performing in Chattanooga for free. Blacks and whites came, young and old. Some brought their own lawn chairs. Grandparents sat with children on their laps. Teenagers hung out around the lampposts. And I sat on the curb with two new friends.
I looked around at this scene in August 1981 and said to myself, “This is not the same town I grew up in. Something is happening.”
Well, something was happening. But, to tell the honest truth, that’s not the only reason I stayed in Chattanooga. That day I’d met a man, and we married
a year later. So my life changed … and I became a part of my hometown in the process of transformation.
I eventually read the book on tidying up, and the author Marie Kondo claims that if you declutter, you will lose weight
and something magic will happen in your life. I’m glad I hadn’t read the book earlier or my expectations would’ve been too high.
I called the local history section of the library and asked if they were interested in my files on Chattanooga Venture. Mary Helms, the head of the Local History Department, agreed to add mine to the Venture collection already there, and we talked about creating an archive on Chattanooga’s renaissance, basically 1980 to 2005.
I called other people whose organizations had been involved 30 years ago and found they were in various stages of tidying up, too. I urged them not to throw out their old files but to donate them to the library’s archive.
When I took my boxes to the library, I felt many conflicting emotions. I was relieved to find a home for them. I hoped that they would serve someone someday the way they had served me. But at the same time, I felt like I was abandoning an old friend, dumping love letters in the trash or giving away trade secrets.
There is peace of mind in a clean desk. But I didn’t stop there. I took down all the shelves. Painted the room. Threw a lot away. What was next? What new possibilities awaited now that the room was flushed?
While my son-in-law helped me paint the room, he asked, “What are you going to use this room for now?”
And in that moment, I knew. “It’s going to be for my granddaughter,” I said.
And, as if by the magic author Marie Kondo promised, it came to be so. A brand new venture, from a different sort of transformation, opened up.
Eleanor Cooper, former executive director of Chattanooga Venture and co-author of “Grace, An American Woman in China,” is a visioning and engagement strategist. Contact her at eleanor cooper@epbfi.com.