A place for everything and everything in its place

One of the most astonishing properties of life is the unparalleled power of context. Although the term originates in linguistics (con-text means, in its original Latin form "what comes with the text"), it can be easily applied to the background where anything happens in life, because almost nothing happens in full isolation. (Paraphrasing the Dead Poets Society movie, one could argue that an empty context, i.e. something happen in isolation, is in fact a context.) And backgrounds can turn the most heartily desired event in a nightmare or a dreaded circumstance to be irrelevant or event pleasurable with the right combination of boundary conditions. It is all a matter of how the situation in question fits or disagrees with the context it is happening in.

Over the course of my fourteen years in Catholic school I heard the proverb in the title many tens of times (if not a few hundreds), because several teachers were very fond of quoting it as a reminder of how important it is to have an established order and to follow it. In my case, one of the best occasions to showcase my ability to keep order in my work was, as soon as we were freed from the requirement to use bound notebooks, to carry around a stack of white paper and a tabbed file folder so as to take the notes on loose pages that were carefully numbered, dated and filed by subject. I found a sort of sick pleasure on the rare occasions when I saw the page numbers rolling over one hundred, because it felt like a pat on the back to my good organization system. Of course, having 100 pages meant that they were too much to carry around the whole semester, so I had ring binders at home to unload the folder while keeping everything sorted. There were a few occasions where I accidentally dropped the folder on the hallway, with the consequence that I had to re-sort some of the pages, but with every single one properly indexed it was just a matter of a few minutes.

Photo: Lukas

But today I actually intended to focus on the inconvenience of things happening at the wrong time. The pandemic has force a significant blending of family into work life with the result that some of these intrusions have become memes of their own, from the cat nonchalantly walking into the field of view of your camera during a video conference, the co-worker who snaps at their kids in front of the whole team, or having to stop you own meeting because your child's computer is failing in the middle of an online class. When happening in isolation all these events are either inconsequential or well-justified lesser evils, but when they happen in the middle of your professional life they can become a serious problem. But the conflict is not limited to this realm.

In every situation of life things that happen at the wrong time can be very disruptive. The paradigmatic boss calling for an impromptu meeting at 4 p.m. just as you are finishing up your work for the day to head home is just one example. Or the phone call that you have been waiting for all morning happens to ring as you are half-way to the restroom. Or your online shopping delivery coming in in the ten minutes you spent under the shower. The examples are countless, because very frequently we cannot control when things happen so, following Murphy's Law, a fraction of them will come at an inconvenient moment and those will be the ones we remember more strongly, in the same way you always remember when you get a dent in the car but never think any longer about all the near misses that did not come to anything.

In my case, a recurring source of uncomfortable surprises are Trevor's Latin assignments. Admittedly, Latin can be very intricate at times, with many peculiar constructions and all the case and gender coordination, so I can understand that sometimes the translations look simply daunting and he needs a certain amount of moral support (or even a contribution from my own modest knowledge) to complete them, but he has an inexplicable talent to defer the homework precisely to the days where my agenda is the most packed (Wednesdays can be really bad). So I have ended up agreeing with him to move up his Latin assignment deadlines to days of the week where I can help him best. In the end I will have to admit that my teachers (or the old writers from the 18th century) wer right to think that things are better when everything has a designated place. Enjoy the week.