I hear a judge’s gavel banging “ORDER IN THE COURT!!” My body tenses, I automatically feel like I’m in trouble.
Order as put upon me by outside forces goes against my grain. But on the inside I know that order also creates peace, safety and opens up space and energy for life to flow through.
When I was a kid I would try to create order. I tried plotting out on my calendar what clothes I would wear each day. I would sit down and make the calendar, pairing my favorite knickers, legwarmers and usually purple tops, or my favorite sweater with the strawberries on it.
For a moment I would feel some relief, a plan was made. But then, the next morning, I wouldn’t feel like wearing what I had planned. Maybe it was colder than I thought, or I just felt like wearing something else. Internal conflict ensues. Follow my plan? Or rebel against myself?
Well, I am not one to be uncomfortable in my clothes (don’t even get me started on shoes…) so the plan would always fall to the side. Imposing order from the outside ahead of time doesn’t work for me.
Creating order was a favorite childhood activity. I would often rearrange my room, reorganizing my closet, drawers and bookshelves. My parents would even let me re-order the kitchen cabinets. I would move my furniture on the regular, I even tried living in different rooms in the house.
I still like creating order out of chaos like when I carved out my pottery corner of the “full garage” but combining items, rearranging and generally doing a better job of managing the space than my garage mate had.
Following the order of nature is something that I have come to rely on as well. There is definitely order in the sun, the moon, the seasons. They always come in the same order, although within that order there is of course chaos. Order in this way is a framework for all of the chaos to happen. Not all of the bulbs I planted will come up. Some will come up in random places…(squirrel intervention I suspect). Some will not survive the winter.
Life as a parent often involves creating order in chaos. Kids especially feel safe in order. When they know that nap comes after lunch every day, there’s a much higher chance of that happening than trying to randomly insert nap time. Right?
So order is good for the body, for the earth, for our sense of comfort. But too much order can take the fun out of everything. When we try to force order as a way of avoiding or staving off chaos, then I think we set ourselves up to miss out on the beauty of the unknown.
When I drew out the lines of order and chaos, I could feel the rigidity of order, of the lines conforming in a way. Of the space around and between the lines, that they are isolated in some way. It’s neat and it’s stiff. Uncomfortable even, for me.
The lines of chaos wiggled and curved, overlapped and were wild, and free. I didn’t have to try. Something spontaneous happened also as I noticed that the not yet dry purple lines were swirling with the blue to create a middle color. I see more possibilities in the chaos.
I think it’s my comfortability in chaos and desire to create flexible order that has led to my newest coaching offer “Calm in Chaos” because chaos exists everywhere. We can easily get sucked into the drama of it, it can pull us away from our center, the earth pulled out from under our feet. We can feel unsure, scared. But when we learn how to exist within the calm center that is always there… that’s where we can truly live.