Some people meditate, some people pray, some people listen to music. When I can't go for a run, I read through the Ikea catalogue.
When life gets stressful, I run to the comfort of hundreds of images of perfect organization. It calms me and clears my mind, as if I'm filing away my cluttered thoughts in the Svetborg bins or the Bafrinko boxes on the page. Everything has its place in an Ikea room; even the oddity all makes perfect sense. It's a vivid world of color and imagination; at the same time, its a world of perfect order. It's like a world I long to live in, where even the strange quirks turn out to be brilliant useful features.
I have always been passionate about organization; it's a strange thing to be passionate about. I suppose it's just a manifestation of the need to feel in some kind of control. I may feel helpless and confused in certain situations, but damn it if I can't get all the books on the shelf into alphabetical order. The need to create systems is a rebellion against the reality of so much randomness.
Even when I have a spat with the Russian lover, or when the Russian lover is having a crisis at work, the first thing I long to do is clean something -- anything. Dishes are good, because there are always dishes in the kitchen. The Russian lover hates this tendency of mine; my twitchy artificial busyness just makes him more aggrevated. One time during a fight he baffled me by doing all the dishes; I think in retrospect it was an effort to thwart my default settings and get me to develop a different response. In any event, I managed to stay calm for a record 30 minutes before I had to clean a bathroom. But so help me, that 30 minutes where I was able to just sit and go about my business was a milestone. I experienced conflict, and even though I didn't immediately start cleaning up something around me, the world didn't end.
But my Ikea catalogue habit I'll keep, I think. It's like my holy book; reading it just makes me feel a bit better, like the universe might turn out to make sense after all.