Order amid chaos: An enlightening experience

Last month I embarked on a simple, renovation plan at home — the addition of a ceiling height bookshelf to keep my ever growing collection of books in one of the rooms. Within a few days, the house was in a state of chaos. The room had to be emptied and all the stuff therein (most of us are such pack rats and hoarders) was accommodated in the other rooms. The work took longer than expected. The energies were fouled up. There was dust everywhere from the scraping and plastering and I felt that I was going insane.

On reflection I realised that chaos is a given. The world itself goes through phases during which there is some semblance of order, interspersed with periods of destruction, ruin and upheaval followed by rebuilding and renewal. What I really needed to do in the interim was to keep my head above all the mess and disorder and focus on the larger goal of creating an organised storage space.

If you think about it, chaos and order co- exist. Because no matter how badly in disarray things are at an outer level, peace and quiet can be found in the still centre within each one of us. Deep down, the ocean is always calmer (of course there are currents) despite whatever happens on the surface. Outer chaos forces us to seek out this inner core of quiet. A little bit of chaos every now and then is therefore a good thing and has its benefits. It forces us to look at life and things afresh, spring clean (including at the mental level), rearrange, give away/discard what someone else can put to better use or is of no use  and create a  new order.

Chaos worries us because we have gotten used to a certain way of doing things that a slight disruption, change or departure from what was in force so long is not to our liking. It disturbs our comfort level. The possibility of a better order emerging is not something that is on our radar when we are in the midst of a turbulent phase. The fact of the matter is that the transition from chaos to order is more often than not bound to give us new insights if we stop protesting, kicking and screaming and accept it as a passing phase.

In math there is this chaos theory that those involved in predictive analytics talk about — a given set of conditions leads to a certain outcome but if the conditions are altered marginally the outcome does not vary in commensurate proportion. The outcome could be something vastly different and totally unexpected — especially when we are talking about mind states or the weather unlike in the case of linear stuff like gravity and electricity. This is why some proponents of the chaos theory talk about expecting the unexpected. Taking a leaf out of this if we learn to take the unexpected in our stride and look at it as an enlightening experience the chaotic phases in life will be less daunting after all.

The writer is a Reiki channel, yoga practitioner and a spiritual seeker