I found Dr Jorden Petersons’ work some time ago. I wanted to turn my life around and give myself meaning. So I found this technique and learned to orient myself in the right direction. I am going to explain this technique with both his words and mine.
Clean your room!
Start fixing the world by cleaning up your room. This statement by Dr Jorden Peterson attracts some humour as everyone’s mother has told them that a thousand times. Your room is an externalization of your mind. The room you see is your preconception of the space that you inhabit. It’s not your room anymore but a place of potential.
When your mind has a genuine aim, it will reconfigure the world in keeping with that purpose, and that’s how you see the world, so be careful. The direction your looking at determines the way the world manifests itself to you. Keep in mind random things still do happen.
Why should you improve yourself? You don’t want to suffer any more than you must. If you don’t organize yourself properly, it does affect you significantly. You’ll need to orient towards something; otherwise, you’re disoriented. You spin around in circles and suffer, as will the people around you. So get your act together.
If you want to change the world, start from yourself and work outward because you build your competence that way. And it’s humble because you’re staying within your domain of competence. If you can’t clean your room, who are you to advise the world?
How would you go about getting your act together? The first thing you can do is look around within your direct sphere of influence. Your room is a good place as it’s a domain you can manipulate. For some, that’s all you have; it is just a room! You’ve got this space right before you; that’s part of the Cosmos you can come to grips with.
How do you do that, exactly? Let’s say you are ready to sort and beautify your room because beauty is also essential. You can do something as simple as sitting on your bed and think, “So that tomorrow morning is slightly better than this morning was, or at least I’m staying caught up. “What am I going to use this room for?” Ask yourself genuine questions “What is it that you could change, that you would change to set things more right today, that would make it less hideous and horrible.?” It’s usually some small thing cause you need to be more disciplined. Make micro goals that you will do. It won’t be something you want to do; there’ll be things you’re trying to avoid. Start where you can start and look around for something that bothers you, and things will pop out around you as in need of repair.
Then you can do it and put it in order. And fix the things that announce themselves as in need of repair. That place over there could use some work; clean up under your bed, make your bed and organize the papers on your desk. Things are a little clearer around you, and you’re a bit better off cause you have practised a bit, and you are a little bit stronger, and something else manifests itself and says maybe you could take a crack and fix me up to, and you decide to do that, and then that gets a little more pristine.
And then you put the world together a little more, which spreads out. You want to make the pathways as clear and pristine as possible. You’re trying to set up the environment to facilitate the actions you intend to pursue there. A room is a place to sleep. And so, if you set your space up correctly, you figure out how to sleep, when you should sleep, and how you should rest. And then figure out when you should wake up. And then you figure out what clothes you should wear. Because they require appropriate arranging in your dresser, you must have someplace to put your clothes. And if you have some clothes on, you must figure out what you’ll wear those clothes to do. And that means you have to figure out what you will do! And then, your room has to serve that purpose! What it means to “set up your room” is that you have somewhere to go that’s worthwhile; And then, the next thing is: maybe you have to make it beautiful. To beautify your room means that you also have to develop your capacity to be creative! And so, practising that is a constructive form of meditation.
You can then fix the things you repeat daily, constituting 50% of your day. You get up, brush your teeth, have breakfast and your routines you go through every day. The stuff you do every day is the most important. If you fix 100 things like that in your life, your world will be different and fewer traps to enter.
When you start building this little microcosm of perfection with what you have, it’ll evoke all the pathologies of everyone in your household! They’ll wonder what you’re up to in there, and they won’t necessarily be happy. Because if they’re in a lowly place, and so are you, and you’re trying to move out of that, the higher you move out of that, the more the place they’re in looks bad! What will happen is that they will attempt to pull you back down. What that means is that if you’re going to organize your room, you’ll have to confront the devils in your house; that’s often terrifying because some of those devils have lineages that go back many, many, many generations!
To sort yourself out and fix up your room is a non-trivial matter. You’ll learn by doing that, and then you can fix up your family. Then, having done that, you’ll have enough character so that when you try to operate in the world at your job, or maybe in the broader social spheres, you’ll be a force for good instead of harm! Because you will have learned some humility by noting just how difficult it was to put your room together! And yourself, for that matter. Make a tiny step forward, making you slightly more substantial than before. And the next step can be somewhat more significant, and it’s the path of humility.
What’s important is that you learn how to distinguish between chaos and order and to be able to act in a manner that produces order. But you also construct yourself into something capable of calling order from chaos. And that makes you just incrementally stronger! And the next day, you can take on a slightly larger task! And you get the benefit of compound interest; if you do that, it’s a tremendously powerful technique. If you do that, instead of just fixing things up that are not good, you’ll start to get a glimmer of the positive things you could do that would constitute a vision.