Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness

by Ingrid Fetell Lee

I stumbled on a blog called Things Organized Neatly. Just as the name suggests, it’s a compendium of objects arranged in trim layouts, as if a fanatic house cleaner has sorted and straightened small piles of miscellany around the globe. There were fall leaves arranged in a colorful gradient, feathers lined up by size, and seashells organized by type. There were offbeat selections, like a layout of tiny utensils—forks and knives, ladles and trowels—from Barbie’s various Dreamhouses, and a grid of ninety toast slices progressing from lightest in one corner to darkest in the other. Some were clever and visually stunning, like Carl Kleiner’s layouts for the IKEA cookbook Homemade Is Best, which features neat piles of all the ingredients needed for each recipe: tidy mounds of flour, pyramids of butter, and vanilla beans lined up like soldiers. Some were poignant, like Barry Rosenthal’s colorful compositions of plastic items found washed up on beaches. What was most intriguing, though, was the way that order brought delight to things that weren’t particularly joyful, objects that might normally evoke even fear or disgust, like knives, surgical implements, or a pile of silvery dead fish, arrayed by size.