When I was about 10 years old my parents bought me a set of red metal shelves. I don’t remember if it was a gift I had requested, or if they just decided I needed a hint to clean my room. But that gift inspired a change. It is my earliest memory of a step forward in my lifelong struggle to keep my personal world, my little corner of the universe, my home, clean and in order.

From the day I lined up my toy cars on the second shelf — each one not only in line, but also in a specific parking spot that it held exclusively from then on — all the way through high school and college, I pursued orderliness with a zeal as strong as anyone I knew. One of my first rules was the mantra, “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” Once I was happy with an arrangement, I seldom changed it. If you had snapped a photo of my dorm room on the first day of classes, and compared it with another taken on graduation weekend, you might not have noticed any difference. [Edit: I should be clear that orderliness does not require that arrangements be static; however, constant change does interfere with orderliness.]

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