While packing for my trip back home for the holidays, I caught myself doing something curious: I was sorting my things into packing cubes corresponding to certain days, certain legs of my trip as they’d been sketched out roughly in my head.
Over the next few days, the same thing would happen: This cube with that bag of knickknacks, both stuffed into this duffel bag, specifically for this couple of days with this group of people. That bag for this trip, somewhere colder. And again, and again — a different set for a different stop, prepped and swapped in, quick as nothing.
It used to bother me when life didn’t feel cohesive. Everything was supposed to have its place; all those spaces were supposed to fit together; all of it was supposed to be essential, interwoven and inextricable, moving along as a predictable, if not harmonious, whole.
But I’m coming to learn that there’s a difference between what is absolutely essential and what is nice, or even necessary, to have in a given moment — and that the former can be a very small category indeed. Does the world end if I forget to pack my laptop charger and only realise once I’m already on the plane? No. Does time stop if everybody’s calendars are full and we can’t find shared dates for a trip? No. Life keeps going, and I’ve realised that it can move along at quite a clip even when so much has been — temporarily or not, for better or worse — shucked away.
There’s a concept from my management strategy classes that has somehow stayed with me: modularization, or the disaggregation of systems into more self-contained units. One of the main benefits is to reduce complex dependencies and their attendant risks, i.e., chaos in one unit is less likely to set fire to the whole. (Modules can still slot together to form a greater, functional unit, if necessary or expedient. But not doing so doesn’t render each unit useless.)
I suppose this tendency to map organizational theory onto the workings of my life is something I should probably sit down and reflect upon someday. But for now, it’s been a useful mental model for helping me expand my window of tolerance, as it were, and roll with whatever punches the world throws my way. A modular framework allows me to stay whole, funnily enough, by reminding me of the many different units that comprise life as I know it. Yes, setbacks and disappointments do happen; expectations can and will be recalibrated; and none of that has to shut the whole operation down each time.
Where does this sit, in the grander scheme of things? This useful little framework helps me ask. Do you see, then, how much exists beyond and outside of this, and how it can’t possibly colour everything else?
Or, phrased differently on more melodramatic days: Why put all the pieces of your heart in one basket?
