I had procrastinated long enough. It was time to clean my office. My office is the only room in my home where I close the door, where I feel the need to close the door.

Okay, since the thought of perusing files, then filling bags and throwing them out, not to mention shredding tax returns from 2002, seemed too overwhelming, at least, I decided, I could clean my desk.

I have file cabinets in my office, but somehow I seem to prefer using the real estate of my desktop for things I want to get to quickly or papers I’m not sure what to do with yet. That pretty much encompasses everything in my known (office) universe.

The first level of cleaning involved actually reading my papers and asking myself whether I needed the record any more. Critically examining something before throwing it away and glancing at it at in order to categorize it and place it in its to be filed stack are two very different operations.

Slowly, I made progress. Papers made their way to a folder or to a garbage bag. Business cards found their alphabetical neighbors and were slipped between their corresponding tabs in my card file. As I started to see more of my desktop’s wooden surface, I noticed I became more and more anxious. Why wasn’t I feeling happier or more accomplished?

There’s a foreboding sort of feeling that comes with “clean.” Clean is the ultimate reminder of the ephemeral nature of things. As soon as something can be declared “clean,” it is understood that from that point on, it can only become dirtier. Sometimes, nothing has to happen in order for a perfect state of clean to degrade. All that’s required is a change in perception. If you just look at a clean room, or clean wall, or even a clean piece of paper long enough, you will start to see imperfections, blemishes, marks. Hell, I thought, my newly cleaned desk doesn’t have a chance

It’s still worth it, though, right? I tried to convince myself that the effort was valuable, even beneficial. But I felt sentenced to some kind of future failure. Inevitably, I would not be able to keep my desk clean.

To a large extent, I pondered, we think of a physical space as clean because we can’t see anything on it or in it. But when it comes to our conscience, we think of it as being clean because nothing is hidden. I started liking the idea of adapting this definition of clean to my desk.

If I viewed the contents of my desk every day and pared down my papers enough so that I knew exactly what took up any space — if I didn’t hide anything from myself, wouldn’t that be clean enough? Making consciousness my new metric for a clean I could keep is no small thing.