Order ... Chaos, or Both?

Blog86:

When juxtaposed, could chaos and order happen at the same time? Don’t respond just yet.  Instead, take a mind-trip with me.

Look around. Listen, and then wonder at events taking place in different settings, but occurring in the same hour of the day.  Enter now.  Bounce your senses of hearing and sight from one room to the other.

Find disarray in a spot, a desk, a counter, a room.  Watch spontaneous confusion of children grabbing items from other children.  Spy for the direction from which a child screams at his peers and surges toward one to engage in a conflict.  Something is about to happen.  Sense the turmoil of other children in the room tolerating a shrieking voice.  Catch a sight of oblivious children in a corner immersed in their task at a corner.  As you enter the first room, note the table in the far right.   Children have strewn art work, and put task papers every which way.  Take one quick look!  Take one deep, breath!  What’s happening in this place?

Purposely back track your steps now.  Freeze the scene you just witnessed.  Go in to the next room and watch unfolding events hand in hand.

Go in unnoticed.  Tiptoe to a table where four children are deeply engrossed in their writing and drawing.  Scan the room some more.  Now spot five children down the carpet who are solving number problems, and are consulting one another on results of their mind-struggle.  Their body language and faces say a lot.  At a listening corner, view the four other children equipped with their headphones.  Do you see them each holding on closely to a book, pausing and flipping the pages of their book right on bell tone cue?  Move your eyes next to the opposite corner.  Take a glimpse of the three other children matching letter symbols and pictures. From time to time, one pulls a piece from someone’s pile to solve her very own puzzle.  Suspend the thoughts on what you just saw, and this time … do listen.  Do you hear that faint music playing in the background?  Are the consulting whispers from other parts of the room audible to you?  Note the busy hands, and the moving about eyes at work.  Wonder at questions those young minds are asking.  Think about the quiet exchanges that might possibly be shaping.  What are you thinking at this point?

I am asking myself, “Could chaos and order simultaneously take place in parallel time?”

        More than ever, I’ve come to really believe that chaos and order indeed coincidentally happen in our world.   Those two rooms I asked you to imprint in your minds’ views are vicarious shots of events that took place side by side.  They motivated me to weigh in on the events.  I had lately begun minding chaos and order deeply in the recesses of my overactive mind.  I catch them in obscure places I happen to be.  I catch them in my littlest space, and in the narrowest nook where I have settled in this big and wide world.  I have come to realize that I am a dot in the sea of many thousands of dots singing, breathing, living, bouncing from place to place.  At times, the dots do settle.  In other moments, they clash.  It’s much like blaringly shouting and living contentedly in the narrowest of gaps at the same time.  My peaceful moments easily turn or get forced into combative split seconds.  Turbulence and harmony intertwine from time to time.  It is a fact that I do get lost in the most open, widest circumstances.

It’s a complex world we live in.  Natural or man-made disasters and conflicts take over our lives or throw us off- balanced.  In the wink of an eye, houses could get demolished due to an active storm or fire, floods could quickly gobble up lands, and structures could fall apart.  People’s grounded lives and situations fumble in rocky paths and get muddled, just like that.  Peaceful feelings collapse.  Chaos explodes!  On the other hand, our worlds and lives take on composed scenes, soothing rhythms, serene streams of action one after another.  We sleep soundly in quiet places.  We work and take leisure moments side by side.  We visit with family or friends and enjoy pleasant atmospheres of fellowship and camaraderie.  We maintain the status quo, stick to what we know, go along with the flow of tides, and abide by strictest rules we set for ourselves or those imposed by our cultural and social circles.  We hope and also guard that we do not ruffle anyone’s feathers.  We do anything in our power so that nothing disrupts life patterns and pulses.   We ensure that Order sleeps soundly. 

Chaos and order seem to get the best and worst of us.  To you, which of the two realities robustly tests courage, patience or intellect? 

Dig deeply.  Seek further, and find!