The joy of wallowing in a perfect mess

I'm back from holiday in the  Scottish Isles  and have been attempting to clear my office of all the paperwork and part projects that have accumulated over recent years in readiness for a push with 'Link Grease' - the web application we're building to help bloggers support and grow their web site's community. 
But it really struck me yesterday, in the middle of my 'get sorted' campaign, how the more we try to organise our lives the less serendipity we experience, and (despite all the good advice and 'lifehacks' we come across on the web) the more we let go of our need to control the things that are happening in our life, the better those things have a way of working out.
Perhaps you use a system like GTD to clear your mental decks and manage the fire hose of information in your life, or maybe, like me, you like to take yourself off to some remote place to get your mojo back.  Whatever our thing, it almost certainly arises from a belief that to experience 'flow', joy and real creativity we need to organise our life in a way that gives us more of the conditions that are conducive to these states.
And yet this belief has never really worked for me.. and not for others I've talked to either.  Life has a habit of throwing us a curve ball just when we think we've got it sussed;  or the flow we experience is nothing like the transcendent feeling we vaguely remember from our youth;  or by some act of Grace we do experience the bliss of real Flow.. but it's when we least expect it - often when we have almost given up on getting it back again.
In fact it's almost as if the quality of 'flow' we experience is inversely proportional to the amount of control we impose in an effort to experience it in the first place.  For most of us, 'flow' and the bliss of being fully present in the moment seems to come in fits and starts showing us mere flashes of our true potential.  Yet we never quite seem to make the connection between our need to control our life and our lack of flow and serendipity, do we?  So what gives?
This passage from Eckhart Tolle's book,  A New Earth: Awakening to your Life's Purpose  perhaps hints at the answer.  It describes the predicament many of us feel as we try to gets more organised, more productive and more satisfaction in our lives.