Having spent much of the day at my desk, I look back and reflect on what’s been accomplished. Not much on the face of it. It is clear once again, but won’t remain that way. The bills will once again begin to accumulate, anxiously demanding their due. The receipts and slips from purchases and services rendered will again multiply, waiting to be reconciled with incoming paper that will require explanatory notes in return, with multiple copies of one or another form, in justification.

Invariably, there will be something missing: an errant receipt, a return of some kind filed erroneously and lost somewhere, within a box, stored for future anthropologists or more likely, a paper shredder.

This exercise, sometimes stomach-clenching (“can I really have spent so much on THAT?”), sometimes merely bothersome ( “I’ve run out of those large envelopes again? Didn’t I buy stamps last week?”) is a concrete exercise in curating life. The first step in curation is the management of data.

My desk, today, serves to anchor my thinking. It begins in concreteness. Next, the activity of clearing my desk extends my thoughts to knowledge management as I begin to reckon with household finances. What is salient in my mind (the thought residue of a messy desk) presses upon my short-term organization of household affairs. Extending this product of thinking a bit further out, the entire sequence, including the various slices of knowledge about my life, revealed by my desk, makes substantial the work of curation.

Another example: filing emails into archival categories reacquaints me with hundreds of interactions, both business and friendship. I read a few, as I go, and remember vividly the interactions, which moments before had been lost entirely, eclipsed by later moments of life, flying by.

How much we discard as we go forward! How much there is to retrieve and to reconfigure!

Sometimes, it is a person we know who reminds us of an aspect of self, or self-knowledge, we’d forgotten we’d known. The psychologists call this “transactive knowledge”. We are continually met with stimuli to juggle memory, to reconfigure thought, and to review decisions. Often, our creative restructuring of this stuff, is hampered by the conservative weight of habit.

And habit is difficult to transform: next week I’ll be back at the beginning, working to clear my messy desk, continuing the ever evolving action of curating my life.

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