Clutter is a good thing?

I greeted this news with a mix of relief and fear: relief that I'm not somehow messing up my life (or that of my kids) by having a messy house, and fear that the news will somehow derail any sort of organizational effort that Dear Partner and I have had going.

From the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/garden/21mess.html):

January is now Get Organized Month, thanks also to the efforts of the National Association of Professional Organizers, whose 4,000 clutter-busting members will be poised, clipboards and trash bags at the ready, to minister to the 10,000 clutter victims the association estimates will be calling for its members’ services just after the new year.
But contrarian voices can be heard in the wilderness. An anti-anticlutter movement is afoot, one that says yes to mess and urges you to embrace your disorder. Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts. It’s a movement that confirms what you have known, deep down, all along: really neat people are not avatars of the good life; they are humorless and inflexible prigs, and have way too much time on their hands.
“It’s chasing an illusion to think that any organization — be it a family unit or a corporation — can be completely rid of disorder on any consistent basis,” said Jerrold Pollak, a neuropsychologist at Seacoast Mental Health Center in Portsmouth, N.H., whose work involves helping people tolerate the inherent disorder in their lives. “And if it could, should it be? Total organization is a futile attempt to deny and control the unpredictability of life. I live in a world of total clutter, advising on cases where you’d think from all the paper it’s the F.B.I. files on the Unabomber,” when, in fact, he said, it’s only “a person with a stiff neck.”

Actually, it confirms what I've pretty much believed all along. It's nice to be as organized as you can. But I also know well what pathological clutter is, having cleared out my Dad's storage unit, and having avoided his house for months. I feel bad about that sometimes, but when I go to the place formerly known as home, it presses all kinds of buttons, especially the one that says: "Throw this shit away!" So I instead invite Dad to visit me, and leave him to his many old newspapers and, my favorite, issues of Catholic Digest from the '70s (we're not Catholic). Somewhere in all that mess are some things that are precious to me. I just hope I have the stamina and the patience to power through the crap someday when Dad's not around to stop me (and for the record, I do not want that day to be anytime soon).