Sunday Salutations with Chaos, Clutter, and Change

Happy Sunday! It is the middle of April, which makes me think about Spring cleaning, change, and growth. Today, I got to do a little bit of all those things, and my plan for the next year is filled with them. Our house right now is a little messy but I am working on tidying it up and overhauling my routine so it can stay tidy – at least tidy-ish – but I think having a full life means chaos and entropy will always be just around the corner.

What is the part of yourself that you try to remodel? And do you ever consider how you can turn that into a strength instead of something you wear yourself out trying to change?

At work, someone I am hoping to work with in the future said they “thrived on chaos.” My first response was that I prefer order. She replied that “organized chaos is the best chaos.” It startled me because I never realized how much that fits what I like in my heart of hearts, as well.

If you just have order, it becomes stagnant and stale. You never can be creative if there is only order.

But chaos, true and utter chaos is too much. I lived through a time when I wasn’t sure where I would sleep one night from the next. I didn’t know when or what I would eat, and everything and anything was chaos. When I got my own place after college, I tried to pursue order, but I was never very good at it at home.

I think this is because the idea of order was so appealing that I started striving for it even when I felt like I was folding myself into a shape I was never really meant to be. My goal this year is to try and learn to be myself.

Which means, finding the balance between order and chaos.

Between protocol and creative.

And science and fiction.

However, I think I am more on the way there than I ever thought I would be.

I am going to try to embrace both parts of myself, the chaos that wants to change and try new ideas, go have adventures and otherwise make sure things are not dull (there is a reason my GM calls me “an agent of chaos”). But I also also want to embrace the other part of me. The part that says a bit of stability is important too. Because the only way for my type of chaos to be fun is when there is a way to keep things structured enough that you know where your throwing knives are, and where your cooking knives are, and don’t mix the two up. In case you didn’t know, the spins are different and there is no reason to ruin a perfectly good knife by using it the wrong way.

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that life would be boring if it was just order. As for chaos… Chaos is change. And while my husband and dog might both believe “change is evil and should be barked at,” they also have come to terms with the fact that outside of work I am an agent of change and randomness – in other words an embodiment of chaos.

I have always tried to keep my work persona as “order, structure, protocol” which is offset by the fact I like new technologies and fresh takes on old ideas. While at home, I like rolling the dice to figure out what to drink or throwing darts to find a new recipe.

(I definitely need to get Anna to read Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books at some point. As those points about Law and Chaos are made by him too. Pure Law or pure Chaos both result in no change, either from locking everything in place or through everything changing so much that nothing changes. -Tod)

However, that isn’t always true. I like to be organized at work, to keep from getting buried by demands. I have decided I want to make some changes at work and at home, to keep my hands on science more than I have been.

I miss both the mess of trying a new protocol and the exhilaration of being productive and organized. I don’t want to do the same thing every day, just as I don’t want to eat the same food every day. But I also don’t want to never know what I am going to be doing and spend my whole day trying to put out fires.

Here is to finding balance between the two.

Here is to organized chaos and hope!

So, to each their own. (Or as L. Neil Smith once wrote, “You fish your side. I fish mine. Nobody fish the middle.” -Tod) May you find your balance between order and chaos, creativity and practicality.

But most importantly, learn to be yourself.

Anna and Tod