In Defense of Rambling
Organization is overrated.
It’s like the chaos of our world instills a feeling of helplessness that makes us crave structure.
Experts pen massive how-tos on decluttering and organizing one’s home, and people flock to them. Because we all want to be clean. And disorganization feels too messy.
As a writing instructor, my lessons hyper-focused on logical flow of ideas. I made charts, cheat sheets, diagrams.
The students still struggled.
The main reason for this difficulty, I’ve come to realize, is the misguided notion that people arrange and understand thoughts in the same way.
Take memory, for example. We all process and categorize our life experiences differently.
When recollecting a moment from my childhood, I rarely remember my age. I might know what house I lived in, who my friends were at the time, but strict chronological details elude me. With perfect clarity, however, I can remember how I felt — how a flippant comment hurt my feelings or the smell of a room instilled a sense of safety.
Surely this disjointedness must happen for others.
Yet memories, and the muddled way in which they rise to the surface, maintain their value despite the inherent disarray.
Some of my best reads, from short-form articles to lengthy memoirs, have rambled. Without bold headlines or numbered points, they’ve inspired and entertained without any recognizable structure.
Dani Shapiro’s memoir, Devotion, moves about as neatly as a toddler. She recollects her first marriage and early career in one line only to jump ahead 20 years and detail giving birth to her son in the next. Still, the lack of form mimics the way our minds catalog memories, and the disorganization works.
I’ve had a hard time lately. Since moving to a new city about four years ago, I’ve struggled to adjust. Professional confusion and parental struggles only compounded my intense desire to move back home.
Internal strife rarely fails to manifest itself in close relationships, so my husband and children have noticed the malaise, to say the least.
A few nights ago I awoke about 2:30 a.m. only to feel an empty space where my husband should have been. Moments later, he opened the door and gingerly slipped under the covers.
“What’s going on? Is everything ok?” I asked. “Yes, yes,” he returned. “I just couldn’t sleep so I thought I’d write you a little note. It’s nothing important. Go back to sleep.”
The next morning I opened my email to find something in the inbox titled, “Rambling.” In it, my husband did as the title suggested. In a moment of concern, he decided not to edit his thoughts (likely a waste that early in the morning, anyway) and instead talked to me the only way he felt he could.
The gesture was lovely.
As writers, reasonable design feels essential to high-quality work. But must it be so in every compositional situation?
Sometimes, can’t we just ramble? Lay out our ruminations without setting them up in quaintly-arranged rows, like a glass menagerie meant to sit idle and collect dust?
Because some days all this structure feels suffocating. I don’t always want to learn how to rewire my negative thinking in four well-constructed bullet points.
Some days I want to read and not have to think so much.
Some days I want to ramble.
