Evolving in Chaos

We spend our lives planning ways to “arrive”—building careers, homes, and routines, convinced that being in control will bring us security. But what if chaos isn’t the ruin of our lives, but the very catalyst of creativity and adaptation we need to live in greater service to the web of life and relationships that hold us?

Enjoy this 7 1/2 minute read or let me read it to you here.

I don’t think I’m alone in my search for a place to settle: the right city, the right career, the right partner. Humans have been migrating, inventing, and falling in love as long as we’ve been on two legs and self-aware. But what feels out of sync with the flow of nature is the deeply ingrained belief that once I arrive, if I do it right, I can settle. Everything will be settled. And then my life can finally begin.

Only this isn’t how life works. Each of us who believes this fantasy, no matter how subconsciously, has been tricked out of one of the most profoundly anchoring truths of the universe: chaos. While we busy ourselves with building our careers, raising responsible children, saving for retirement, championing causes, and keeping our homes and bodies in tip top shape, chaos is unraveling it all.

We aren’t, as Newtonian physics would have us believe, distinct objects on a plane, exerting force on other fixed objects that will respond in orderly and predictable ways. We aren’t cogs in a machine, gears in the clock. You can’t break a person down into distinct organs, an organization into job titles, or a community into shops and businesses and really understand how and why they do what they do. So why do we try to live our lives – or run our businesses or cities – as if there’s a syllabus, instruction manual, or restaurant menu?

Accepting how little we actually control – especially in the times we’re in – stirs up too much vulnerability, fear, and grief. We’re wild imaginations inhabiting plushy bodies, reliant on so many outside factors to provide us food, safety, shelter, warmth, and love. We’re dependant on our customers and employers, supply chains, energy systems, fellow law-abiding citizens, and the kindness of our friends and families. Everything we have and are can – and will – change. Everything we hold will be lost. The closest we can be to another human being, as Rilke writes, is to sit side by side with this essential loneliness.

So it should come as a relief that our individual, separate identity, is simply part of the truth and not the whole truth. We are both particles and waves. We are both here and not here depending on how we are seen and held. In short, we are ever-shifting nodes in a vast network of relationships – human and more-than-human, seen and unseen – that weave together the past, the future, and whatever we perceive as the present.

This shift in perspective has profound implications on both personal and collective experience. My anger, grief, disorientation, and depression are not flaws in my mechanism to be analyzed and corrected. They are a product of the relationships in which I’m embedded. A coworker’s failures aren’t something to simply criticize or discipline, but an invitation to investigate the systems and culture that contribute – at the job, at home, in society, and within our intertwined cultural histories. Humans aren’t a scourge the earth would be better off without. We are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of co-evolution with our environment that enabled us to survive and expand – as everything in the cosmos does – until it reaches its limits.

Thinking we can control the unfolding of things – in our lives, our communities, or for the planet – is putting ourselves in the role of clock-maker, orchestrator, overlord. History has shown us that while we may believe ourselves to be that powerful, we are not. When we try to control what we cannot fully understand, we become selfish, oppressive, and drain the life force around us. But we can observe all the interconnections, how they influence and self-organize, and make conscious choices to enhance instead of hamper the system within which we live. We can become stewards of the physical and metaphorical ecosystems we belong to and depend on, coaxing out the most benevolent and life-affirming potential of our best understanding of what is, while knowing the unexpected will always arise to surprise and confound us.

And why shouldn’t it? The Trickster has always been an agent of play, of adaptation, of disintegrating old forms to make space for the new. The inconvenience, nuisance, failure and heartbreak is what drives creativity, what pushes us to evolve past our limited, inherently unsustainable comforts and preferences.

So we let the outdated systems fail. We let the new work initiative everyone is too stressed to implement fall flat. We let the relationship we’ve run out of patience and stamina for fall apart. We let go of our diet and exercise routines because we just can’t stomach forcing ourselves to do one more thing. And we let go of the idea of a loving, all-powerful God because how could such an entity stand by and let all this happen.

Give everything around you that is trying to die or has no ground on which to stand the respect it deserves. Let it go. Let it become compost and wait for Spring to see what sprouts.

When we’re willing to let go, we discover we’re still held in a network of relationships with the neighbor who walks her dog, the guy who brings the mail, the woman who stocks the grocery shelf, the stranger who honors the stop sign, and the nerd who keeps our bank account encrypted. We’re held by the clouds that carry the rain that fills our reservoirs, the bacteria that fix nitrogen to roots that infuse our food with nutrients, the electromagnetic and gravitational forces that keep us orbiting in just the right way for the sun to sustain us.

We don’t succeed or fail alone. We don’t and can’t change in isolation. But we can recognize the network of relationships we’re a part of and serve it from the most authentic core of our being. Competition, aggression, and dominance rise and fall in the geological blink of an eye. But adaptability, reciprocity, and interdependence are the foundation of the most enduring systems and life forms on this planet. We can weather whatever comes if we hold each other in a new paradigm of generosity, creativity, and kindness and create islands of sanity whenever and wherever we can, whether it’s the way we hire and train staff, raise our children, drive our cars, speak to service workers, deal with household pests, or heal our inner parts.

We cannot protect ourselves or loved ones from failure, loss, or pain. But we can contribute to the evolution of our species by how we choose to flow with whatever arises as one part of a whole.

Nancy

Thanks to Meg Wheatley for giving words to my knowing and inspiring courage to be an ecosystem.