Happy was reorganizing the bookshelf again.
I watched from the doorway as she pulled every book out, sorted them by size, then changed her mind and sorted by color instead. This was the third reorganization this month.
“Are you looking for something?” I asked.
“No. Just… it needs to be better organized.”
Our small Dhaka apartment was a testament to Happy’s need for order. Books arranged precisely. Clothes color-coded in the closet. Kitchen spices alphabetized. Every surface clear of clutter, every item in its designated place.
Yet our best conversations never happened in this carefully maintained order. They happened when the power went out and we sat in the dark. When dinner burned and we ordered takeout instead. When plans collapsed and we had to improvise.
Last week, Happy had planned an elaborate dinner party. Spent three days preparing, created a minute-by-minute schedule, arranged the apartment perfectly. Then everyone canceled last minute—load shedding, traffic, various emergencies.
We’d sat surrounded by all that uneaten food, all that wasted preparation, and Happy had started crying. Not sad crying, but the kind of crying that releases something held too tight for too long.
“I spend so much time organizing,” she’d said. “And for what? So it can all fall apart anyway?”
We’d ended up eating the elaborate dinner ourselves, sitting on the floor instead of at the properly set table, talking until 2 AM about things we never discussed during normally scheduled life. It was the best evening we’d had in months.
“Why do you think you do it?” I asked now, watching her rearrange books.
“Do what?”
“Organize everything. Control everything.”
She paused, holding a book mid-air. “Because if I don’t, everything falls apart.”
“Does it though? Or does it just… exist differently?”
She didn’t answer, but I saw her thinking.
I understood the impulse. My own life was a carefully constructed routine designed to fight off chaos. Wake at 6 AM. Coffee made the exact same way. Work begun with ritual consistency. Prayers at specific times. Dinner at 8 PM. Bed by 11 PM.
The routine was supposed to create calm. Instead, it created anxiety about maintaining the routine. If I woke up at 6:15 instead of 6:00, the whole day felt off. If someone interrupted my morning routine, I’d feel unsettled for hours.
I was fighting entropy itself—trying to impose human order on a universe that physicists tell us tends toward disorder. It was exhausting and probably futile.
“Baba, can you help me?” Arash called from his room.
I found him sitting in the middle of controlled chaos. Homework scattered across the floor, books open to random pages, pencils everywhere, papers crumpled and uncrumpled. It looked like a bomb had gone off in a stationery store.
“What are you working on?”
“Science project. About plants. But I keep getting distracted reading about other stuff.”
“Maybe you should organize your workspace first?”
“No, this is good. I can see everything at once.”
And somehow, he could. His apparently chaotic system worked for him in ways my organized approach never had. He’d make connections between random facts, find patterns I couldn’t see, create understanding through what looked like confusion.
“Doesn’t the mess bother you?” I asked.
“Not really. Cleaning up feels like wasting time. I’d rather just work.”
I thought about how much time I spent organizing instead of doing. How much energy went into creating perfect conditions for work that never quite materialized because I was too busy perfecting the conditions.
That evening, Happy and I had dinner with our friends Nabeel and Shirin. Nabeel’s apartment was organized chaos—books everywhere, papers stacked haphazardly, creative projects in various states of completion scattered across every surface.
“Doesn’t it drive you crazy?” Happy asked Shirin.
“Used to. Then I realized he does his best work in this mess. He can find anything he needs instantly. It’s organized to him, even if it looks chaotic to me.”
“But how do you live like this?”
Shirin shrugged. “I have my spaces that are organized. He has his creative chaos. We coexist.”
Walking home, Happy was quiet.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“That maybe I’m organizing because I’m afraid. Not because it’s actually helpful.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Of things falling apart. Of not being in control. Of chaos.”
We stopped at a tea stall. The owner, an old man named Kashem, ran the most disorganized stall I’d ever seen. Cups stacked precariously, tea varieties mixed together, no clear system for anything. Yet he made the best tea in the neighborhood and never forgot anyone’s preferences.
“Kashem Chacha, how do you keep track of everything?” Happy asked.
He laughed. “Track what? I just make tea. If I spent time organizing, when would I have time to talk to people?”
His “chaos” was actually a different kind of order—one based on relationships and experience rather than visual organization.
Back home, I thought about my religious practice. I’d created structure around it—specific times, specific places, specific routines. The structure was supposed to facilitate connection with Allah.
But my most profound spiritual moments had happened outside that structure. When Amma was dying and normal routine became impossible. When Arash was born and everything felt disordered and overwhelming. During those 3 AM moments when planned prayers were impossible but spontaneous ones emerged.
The structure created space for devotion, but the disruption created depth of devotion.
Maybe we needed both.
I found Happy sitting on the floor of our living room, surrounded by all the books she’d pulled out.
“I don’t know how to organize them,” she said. “Every system I try feels wrong.”
“Maybe they don’t need organizing right now.”
“But I already pulled them all out.”
“So leave them out for a while. See what happens.”
She looked uncomfortable with this idea, but didn’t put them back.
Over the next few days, something interesting happened. Arash kept picking up random books from the floor pile. Found books he’d never noticed on the shelf. Started reading things he wouldn’t have chosen if they’d been properly organized.
Happy kept meaning to reorganize them, but kept getting distracted having conversations about the books Arash was discovering.
“This is driving me crazy,” she said one evening, looking at the book pile. “But also… it’s kind of nice? Arash is reading more. We’re talking about books. It feels alive instead of just neat.”
“Maybe mess has purpose sometimes.”
“Don’t get philosophical on me. I’m already having a crisis about order.”
But she smiled saying it.
I started experimenting with my own routines. Skipped my usual morning coffee one day, just to see what happened. Nothing dramatic—just a different kind of morning. Prayed at unexpected times instead of scheduled ones. Let conversations run long instead of cutting them off to maintain schedule.
The world didn’t end. Things didn’t fall apart.
In fact, some things got better. An unplanned conversation with Arash about his questions led to the best father-son talk we’d had in months. A disrupted routine created space for actually noticing what was happening around me instead of just executing my schedule.
“I think I’ve been using organization as avoidance,” I told Happy one night. “Keeping everything ordered so I don’t have to deal with what’s actually happening.”
“Same,” she admitted. “Easier to organize books than to think about why I need everything perfect.”
“Why do you think you need it?”
She was quiet for a long time. “Because growing up, everything was chaotic. Abba drinking, Amma working three jobs, moving apartments constantly. No stability. I swore when I had my own place, it would be different. Controlled. Safe.”
“And is it? Safe?”
“No. Because life isn’t safe. Organization doesn’t actually protect against anything. It just creates illusion of control.”
We sat with that realization.
Arash wandered out of his room. “Why are you both sitting in the dark?”
We hadn’t noticed the lights were off.
“Just talking,” Happy said.
“Can I stay up late and talk too?”
It was a school night. His routine bedtime was 9 PM. It was now 10:30.
Happy looked at me. I shrugged.
“Sure,” Happy said. “Why not?”
Arash sat between us. We talked about everything and nothing—school, friends, what happens when we die, why some people are mean, whether aliens exist. The kind of conversation that doesn’t fit into schedules or plans.
At midnight, Arash finally went to bed. Happy and I stayed up.
“That was good,” she said. “Messy and unplanned and good.”
“Maybe that’s the secret. Not choosing order or chaos, but learning to dance between them.”
“I’m a terrible dancer.”
“Me too. But we’ll figure it out.”
The next morning, Happy left the books on the floor. Left dishes in the sink overnight—something she’d never done before. Watched me notice, watched me not comment.
“Trying an experiment,” she said. “Living with some mess. Seeing if the world ends.”
“And?”
“Still here. Apartment hasn’t collapsed. Might even be breathing easier.”
Our organized chaos—or chaotic organization—became its own kind of system. Structure where it helped. Flexibility where it mattered. Order as foundation, not prison. Disruption as teacher, not enemy.
Perfect? No. But perfect had never been the point.
The point was living. Actually living, not just maintaining systems for living.
The books stayed on the floor for two weeks before Happy finally organized them—but differently this time, loosely, leaving space for disorder.
“Good enough,” she said, looking at the imperfect result.
Good enough.
Maybe that was wisdom: knowing when to organize and when to let chaos teach you something. When to follow routine and when to break it. When to control and when to surrender.
The universe tended toward entropy anyway. Fighting it completely was futile.
Better to dance with it instead.
