A note to the makers of paperclips, post-it notes, and other such organizational supplies:

This is a speech I am working on for a contest on March 17th. Wish me luck.

Common perception says that, in order to function, one must be organized. People must have their lives categorically separated into events and times, planned out in advance, and inspected for safety and relevancy. Professionalism and organization go hand in hand; scholastic achievement is proportional to the amount of writing in the student’s agenda; families should keep a common calendar to live as a cohesive unit. It is easier to artificially separate things, keeping them within defined boundaries arbitrated by clocks and lines on a sheet of paper. That’s not new. Then again, some things just don’t fit in, and their refusal to adhere to an established order frustrates the list makers and secretaries of the world. My deepest apologies go out to those who would have a color-coded and labeled society, because I am one of those miscreants who keeps your dream from coming true.

I am an anomaly and somewhat of a paradox: while I carry the workload of at least one and a half students, I have the organizational skills of a five year old. College application season, then, was an interesting time for my family, which consists of my list-making mother, my early-bird father, and me, the deviant daughter. Our schedules don’t line up at all, and my take-it-as-you-go attitude towards applying to college confused, amused, and infuriated my parents, all at once. They would have understood my process better if I had scheduled some time every week and set it aside for college work, separating thw whole application process from the rest of my life to keep things synchronized and in chronological order. I honestly do wish, sometimes, that I could work that way…but sadly this isn’t the case. Differences in opinion on this matter didn’t create much goodwill between me and my parents, but I think that, because of this friction, they understand me a little more, and we are better friends for it.

Disorganization, slight confusion, the blurring of lines and stepping over of boundaries, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Obviously, promptness and organization have their place in the world, and I know very well that society would fall apart without time keepers to prop it up. Over-categorizing things, though, can be a mistake. We begin to create boundaries in life that are unnecessary and shouldn’t really be there, blocking ourselves off from new ideas. In truth, many more good things have come from combining different areas than from separating them.

Now, in my application process, I’ve begun thinking about choosing a major path of study for the next four years. The question “What do you want to do?” inevitably comes up in conversation, with the inquirer usually expecting a clean answer like, “I want to be an astronaut,” or, “I’m going to be a doctor.” Here again I defy expectations. I’ve gotten more than one condescending look from adults who think that my response is inadequate and misguided: I really don’t know what I want to do with my life. The problem isn’t that I’m not interested in any field or vocation; I’m interested in far too many, and I don’t yet see how I can combine my skills and interests into one life path that keeps me out of a homeless shelter and relatively sane. Therefore, I have applied to twelve schools, a number that is almost far too large, and many of them can hardly be distinguished from one another. Their common factor is an emphasis on a liberal arts education, one which I intend to pursue because its very nature breaks down the boundaries between different areas of life skills. These schools, like me, think that an education in every field, emphasizing their interconnectedness, will produce a better person and a better citizen of the world. Leaders with the ability to make connections between previously separated schools of thought will create movement towards things that will benefit everyone concerned with the welfare of our culture and society.

The best ideas are created when people are mixed together, with no distinction as to creed, upbringing, or specialization. While it might be easier to separate people into groups depending on what they know and what they do, it is certainly more beneficial to create a heterogeneous combination of ideas. A roomful of philosophy professors could come up with a solution to the United States deficit, but how would that solution look to a group of car mechanics used to dealing with small business? Breaking down boundaries will, of course, cause some problems, because there is no way that a very diverse group could completely agree on one issue. This argument, though, is what will create the best possible solution. Even the US government was deliberately set up as a system that thrives on confrontation. There is a reason it takes such a long time to pass a law: politicians with very different beliefs are fighting over it. At surface level this seems to impede good change, but better ideas come from this debate than any coming from a single party, or even a single person.

My class schedule is also organized very rigidly. I go to the English wing for English, the science wing for my physics class, and another section of the building for Calculus. The very nature o f my school day categorizes study into an organized procedure, keeping the fields largely separate. Many teachers bridge some of the gaps between disciplines, but it’s impossible to overcome boundaries between classes for a truly unified education. Strict organization keeps the school running, I know. Without these boundaries, classrooms would be absolute chaos and very little would get done. This means that is it up to us to untie fields that don’t seem interrelated, and my best ideas have always come from combining things that don’t usually go together. Once, in geometry class, we talked very briefly about multiple, higher dimensions, a concept that I saw again in science classes. What if, though, we temporarily removed the boundary between theoretical physics and, say, theology? The mystery of a higher power seems to fit in well with the mysteries of higher dimensions, both of which we can’t understand because we don’t yet have the capacity to. The divisions and areas of life are more connected than we realize, and finding these connections could lead, and have led, to some of the greatest discoveries in history. (Einstein comes to mind—the man who created an equation, as simple as a function for the volume of a shoebox, that connects mass and energy.) I do believe that interconnectedness is the nature of life. It also serves as a handy excuse for why I seem unable to stick to a schedule that separates my day into unrelated components. Or I could just be disorganized. Our world is disorganized, though; does this interconnectedness cause good or prevent it? I don’t know; but it’s something to think about.