For well over twenty years I have been giving lectures and workshops on the subject of cleaning and caring. One of the things that became clear is that the cleaning is not the as much of a problem as the constant disorder that many people find. Without clearing up first you cannot even start to clean. So what is order? It is something desperately longed for by many people, and yet it seems to be very elusive. At the very first cleaning conference I organized in 2004 at the Goetheanum, one of the lecturers said, “Making order is a profoundly creative act, and can be put on the same level as creating works of art; perhaps it is actually be considered the archetypal artistic gesture.”1 When it comes to housekeeping, the concepts of disorder and chaos often get confused. In a household, order is often related to a certain regularity and clarity. We call a room orderly when everything is in its place and we can easily orient ourselves and find our way around. However, as soon as I start working in the room, or children start playing in it, the order very soon turns into disorder. Order seems to have this special quality of effortlessly merging into disorder; yet the opposite never occurs. I have to consciously intervene to re-establish the lost order. So disorder is simply a quality that arises whenever we do anything in
