The mess haunts me. It seems to follow me everywhere. Everywhere I look I see a mess. My natural instinct is to fix, clean, and organize. But after years of chasing and organizing, I’m realizing that the mess is something we never get to leave. We never get to organize everything. We never get to perfect everything. No matter how hard we try, we’re always left with a little bit of a mess.

Life is too complex to clean, to organize, to keep up with. It’s too busy. It’s too hard to understand. And failures and messes are just a part of it.

Instead of trying to fix ‘the mess,’ I’m learning to train my mind to see the beauty in the chaos. I’m learning to love the errors, the failures, the flaws. And it’s not a perfect process. It’s messy. It’s sloppy, and it’s humbling. But there’s also grace.

I’ll probably always lean a little more towards the clean and the organized. The mess is something I can’t completely escape, so I’ll learn to learn to live with it. I’m not, however, waiting for ‘the mess’ to get cleaned before I start living. I’m learning to live within it.