Do you ever feel like your life is out of control, like you’re surrounded by chaos? Maybe even inside yourself, and outside just a swirl of chaos? This seems to be a very common feeling, and maybe it’s the rare exception who really has life feel like an orderly environment.
This seems to be the nature of the world that we live in.
There is a ground state of chaos. […]
It seems like just the very nature of being alive is to be a bubble of order, set against this environment of chaos. […]
Now, when we have our lives feeling like they’re so chaotic, such a mix of all kinds of different things, not knowing where to start, it can be very disorienting and discouraging to those who want to improve their lives, make things better.
Well, how do you make things better if it’s chaos? You can’t make a change, really, to chaos, because you can’t direct that change in any way.
It’s just sort of this sea of things everywhere.
There are a few different approaches that I think can help in this situation.
One is to accept that, to some level, there will be chaos.
We can’t entirely fight against the chaos.
We can’t remove it entirely.
Living in this world, we have to live with some degree of chaos, because everything isn’t perfectly ordered.
So we have to develop almost a comfort with having things not be orderly.
Now, some people have this a lot more than others.
Some people love to live in the storm, and others like to have things very highly organized.
But no matter how highly organized, there is still going to be uncertainty and chaos around us, to some degree at least.
Another principle is that chaos is helped by large numbers.
So reducing the number of things reduces chaos.
It tends to bring things towards order.
So this is where simplicity and minimalism can be so helpful, in that we can just reduce the number of things around us, reduce the clutter, the things that are filling our attention, and everything becomes simplified, everything becomes a little bit more clear, and we’re able to get some open space, some clear space.
But finally, a way that I like to look at it is this idea of being a bubble of order, being one place that is in order.
Even if there’s chaos all around, to have one little place where things are orderly, and let this be a centre.
Let the centre be in order, and then the order can spread out from there.
So if we find that our lives are too full of clutter and chaos, disorganization everywhere, it’s too much to bring order to everything.
But imagine just bringing order to one little place in your life.
Imagine having one place where there is order, that is clear of chaos, and you can go to that place and have a break from the chaos, even if everything else is still disorganized.
It seems like, ideally, this is what a home could be, our home, where we have the most power to control our environment.
We can make our home a pillar of order, a centre, a bubble, the walls of our home, within which we can arrange things as well as we can.
Outside, public spaces, wilderness: this is outside our control.
Tthis is chaos to us.
But within our home, we have the power to make things calm and orderly.
And to have that centre to be able to return to gives us a break from the never-ending swirls of chaos.
But of course, the home is the centre of so much of our daily lives, and if our lives are not ordered, it’s certainly no easy task to have our home be ordered.
It seems like even the task of bringing order to our home cannot be separated from the task of bringing order to our daily lives.
The two can work together.
But to start with, imagine just taking one little piece of the home, one little space.
maybe a whole room, maybe a little corner of a room, maybe one little spot, a little clear surface area, a little corner, a window.
One place to be clear and orderly.
Choose to make one place a centre of order, calm, clear, simple, undisturbed by anything happening around it.
And in fact, just as we can do this with space, we can also do it with time.
Imagine if your day is full of chaotic events, disorganized time, but you find one time per day where you perhaps meditate, perhaps sit quietly, look out a window, maybe read a book, any kind of a quiet time where you can have a break from the chaos, just have that little time, maybe even five minutes, maybe even one minute goes a long way.
Just like having even one square foot of a surface to be your clear space in a home full of chaos.
You could have one minute of your chaotic day be calm.
It seems like just having this central point, this central place where there is a gap in the chaos, is a way to have a break from never-ending storms, and to be the centre of an organization that can grow from there.
Let it be the eye of the storm.
#orderandchaos #orderly #surroundedbychaos