At lunch last Friday, a friend imitated my known tendency to pack all the garbage from my meal into the single largest container, typically a drink cup. It was not clear if it was solely for the purpose of mocking me, or, as I prefer to see it, they'd suddenly realized the calming benefits of doing so, as well as the need for all of us to practice this in order to restore a sort of harmony with the universe.
The act of "trash compacting" is one of several obsessions I wrote about a couple of years back, most of which remain daily habits that, for some bizarre reason, are only known to me as key to preventing the world's rotation from suddenly coming to a dramatic and catastrophic halt. Were I to stop, all non-compulsive occupants would find themselves hurling towards the stratosphere in an ironically unified and organized fashion, while those of us who've consistently kept our currency sequenced and oriented, vacuumed in a repeating pattern and laced our shoes so the top laces of the right shoe cross to the left while the top laces of the left shoe cross to the right, will remain to inherit the earth, allowing us to ensure that all toilet paper rolls are hung with the paper rolling forward and to the front.
This all came to mind last night as I was washing, drying and putting away dishes. I suddenly became aware of a patterned behavior that I typically don't seem to notice. Yet this time around it caught my eye and I had to pause and marvel in hindsight, (with a reasonable degree of fear for my own sanity at the same time,) at the method and intention that clearly runs through my subconscious actions without forethought. While stacking dishes and cups.
I noticed it when I came across a stray cup to store, and became conscious that I was taking measures to an extreme, because I had stopped to determine it's appropriate placement within the existing stack.
As you'll see from the image below, which I snapped on my iPhone (once I stopped shaking my head while buried in the palms of my hands), I'd been sequencing the colors. The first was the stack of plates and bowls. Notice the colors of the bowl stack match the colors of the plate stack. That went unnoticed. But when I found the stray cup, a light blue one, I had to insert it between the pink and dark blue. That's when I realized I had been stacking to a pattern; orange, pink, light blue, dark blue, yellow.... and over again.
Mine is a tortured existence. A sequenced, aligned, and organized tortured existence. :-)