This year was most definitely about just maintaining things for me. Trying to maintain just enough counter space in the kitchen to both store things and prepare food. Trying to maintain just enough room on my desk to keep envelopes and junk mail that I will probably never read and still call my desk a workspace.

How do we accumulate so much clutter in our lives? Or, more specifically, how do I accumulate so much clutter over the course of a year?

I really wanted this year to be more organized than years past. I often ask myself how much better off I would be if I could only straighten up my life. I see people around me with tidy little files and compartments for every aspect of their life. They seem somehow happier because of it.

Being the slob that I am, I wonder about the tidy people of the world. What must their lives be like having never found one of the ink pens stuck to a piece of sugary cereal? Or having to write part of their term paper on purple construction paper, because at 3a.m. they just couldn’t find any more notebook paper to write on?

It must be quite a bit of work to be a tidy person, to have things in their proper place and know that each time you return to get that certain item, it will be just where it was left and not buried beneath a pile of yesterday’s pizza boxes.

I always reasoned that part of being a creative person means being cluttered in one’s thinking and actions. It’s my only justification for how I live. But part of being a creative thinker is finding innovative solutions to problems.

Most of the world’s greatest minds have been admitted slobs in their person lives. Albert Einstein’s desk looked like a war zone on most occasions and how brilliant was he? So, even though I have no intentions of making resolutions this year, I will start out on the odyssey of becoming the world’s first neat and creative person. It’s a feat I think I can pull off, despite the tremendous walls of clutter I have to surmount at the office, at home, and in my poor little car.

So, in the year of 2010, I will put things where they belong, a task for which I was repeatedly rewarded in kindergarten (What happened to me?). I will find a proper place for those things in my life that currently wait in limbo to be placed in a holder, cabinet or folder. I will clean my most sacred of places, the kitchen, in the manner and level of attention it so rightly deserves.

And most important, once all my things are where they should be, I can focus my energy on putting to rest those issues, projects and nagging ideas that plague the creative thinker.

I think I can do it. Wish me luck, Suffolk.