What compels us to sort? We all engage in some daily organization of thoughts, tasks, time, paper, music, photographs - whatever happens to present the most immediate and tangible chaos in our lives. Presently as I write (or, more precisely, type), my brain and my fingers grasp to find the most appropriate words and phrases while often settling for those that respond most immediately to the current query. Of course, in this medium, it is all in the service of expediency. And yet, perhaps the need to be quick does not really aptly describe the act of logging thoughts. Rather, this digital recording must, like any other form of sorting, at some point reach its conclusion. Thus, a response to the question "what compels us to sort?" must resolve itself in the need to create order and to feel that we have, at some point, achieved success in that pursuit.
However, the process of organization is never as clean as your typical type-A personality would like it to be. For example, when we ruminate on past decisions and periods in our lives, we often find it useful to affix labels, much like hours and periods of time in the day, or seasons of the year. Sorting through souvenirs, photos and other remnants of the past exponentially increases the size of the psychological chaos, all while putting forth an extra-human effort to ascribe order to that which refuses such artificial partitioning.
In such an endeavor, expediency equates to necessity. Lingering over fond memories can be permitted for sometime, but not so much as to derail the ultimate task of ordering the past to focus on the present and the future. Lingering over the more gut-wrenching memories has similar potential for derailment, but is much less pleasant and thus, the desire to keep the train stable is much greater. In some circumstances, we sort, hoping and knowing that those objects of triage will pass through our fingers and in front of our eyes once again. When it pertains to others, we have either willfully sorted the painful memories out of the sorting queue, never to be inspected again OR we have simply resigned those parts of our lives, incongruous with present and the foreseeable future, to the nether regions of our memories. For better or for worse, those scraps may reappear in the subconscious of our dreams or may be buried and stifled under the weight of the more recent past, never to be heard from again.
