Let’s talk about chaos.
I’m currently caught up in a tornado of packing and cleaning, navigating a bike through stacks of boxes in an already tight apartment, counting down the days until I move into my beautiful skylit loft and out of my current crooked and cramped one bedroom. My life is complete chaos at the moment. Between juggling sublease drama with my current place and working five days a week right up until move in, my free time to do anything besides packing is pretty much imaginary. I’m in a constant state of wondering what it is that I’m forgetting, and jolting upright in bed to jot things down on the neverending to-do list before they slip away again. But yet, permeating my mind fog of mild panic is a sense of excitement. Excitement about the future and all the possibilities of living in a cool new place, the potential of the space, the thrill of finding a new job, exploring a new neighborhood, making friends with the neighbors, all of it. Yes things are crazy, but I do alright with crazy. Chaos is my comfort zone. Growing up in a house with six people plus pets taught me how to work well in a whirlwind. Background noise placates my ADHD and actually helps me focus on tasks (she types, while listening to music).
To me, few things are more beautiful than chaos. Wonderfully breathtaking art is full of chaos just begging you to examine it in detail. Symmetry and simplicity are all well and good, but chaos is stunning and fascinating. It tempts you to lean in a little closer to take a better look. Even as a young child, I would always get sucked into the elaborate worlds created on the pages of “I Spy” and “Where’s Waldo?” books. I found the strange and bizarre things to look at on every page infinitely fascinating, and would spend hours with a single book, long after I’d found the things viewers are tasked to search for. I just wanted to see it all and soak it in.
Not much has changed since those days of literary hide and seek; I thoroughly enjoy people watching (the key to doing so without being creepy is to wear sunglasses). Intricately detailed patterns appeal to me. I crave hubbub and bustle so much that I seek out busy coffee shops to go and sit in, not even always to work, but just to be stimulated by the environment. That’s really the draw of chaos for me: a multitude of stimulation. The foil to stimulation is boredom. I despise boredom, it zaps energy and motivation, it kills creativity, and it encourages time wasting. How often do we pull out our phones out of boredom in order to kill time and end up wasting it instead of engaging in our environment? I’ll admit I am as guilty of this as anyone else; my phone is my social crutch, my shield to deflect unwanted interactions (less guys hit on you when you’re glued to your phone screen), and a buffer to protect me from discomfort in unfamiliar situations and environments. One of the reasons I like chaos is that it doesn’t leave time for a constant inner monologue about “why did I say it like that?” and “did I make enough eye contact?” or “am I laughing/talking/chewing too loud?” Chaos is Jumping In! feet first with all your clothes on. When your priority is to stay afloat, little things like awkward phrasing pale in comparison to the big stuff such as paying the bills, and ohmygosh there’s so much to do because all the finals are due on the same day.
But chaos is greater than mid-finals panic mode, or hours of material for observation; nature itself is chaos. The tendency of the natural world is entropy, a “gradual decline into disorder.” In layman’s terms, ‘everything naturally goes to shit’. Order becomes chaos and out of chaos comes beauty. It’s a repeating pattern as strange and mysterious as the theory of chaos itself. Chaos theory is the idea that all variables have an impact on a system and is sometimes called the butterfly effect. The butterfly effect is just a well known example that explains the idea; the theoretical butterfly, a small and seemingly inconsequential variable, can have a huge impact by creating a ripple of chain reactions leading to a change in weather patterns that creates a hurricane thousands of miles away. Chaos is also mindbending and bafflingly beautiful; just look at fractals, a classic example of chaotic beauty even though they are actually ordered repeating patterns. Fractals are infinitely repeating at any scale, and the wild part is that they exist in nature! Just think about coral reefs or the roots of a tree, regardless of if you zoom in or out, the same pattern of growth appears at differing scales. Nature is chaos and order and chaotic patterns and ordered nonsense. It is awe inspiring and always interesting, and life would not exist without it.
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