a beautiful chaos

Life is a chaos

A beautiful chaos

I am sitting in a garden and there are leaves lying around on the grass. And of course they are lying in a disordered fashion, chaotically spread over the grass, and it looks beautiful. And as far as dead leaves lying on the ground is concerned, we may not have much issue with it. But much of the time our mind does not like chaos. Our controlling mind is rather fearful of chaos. This mind, which wants everything to be known to be predictable, to this mind chaos is the enemy. It is something to be overcome.

The controlling mind wants order. It wants rules. It wants clear patterns. Only this way can it feel secure. Life is not like that, though. Life by its very nature is a chaos. And a chaos by definition is something that is not ordered. It is not a regular pattern. It is not predictable.

This chaos that is life is the unknown. There is no pattern in it, and this is a great challenge to the mind. The mind looks for patterns. That's all it does. And when it finds a pattern, it starts making predictions based on that pattern. And sometimes, of course, it is approximately true. There are some patterns in life, roughly speaking, so the mind can be useful.

But the difficulty is, fundamentally life does not follow the rules that we would like it to. Life is unpredictable. And this makes us rather ill at ease, at least if we are listening to this controlling mind. And yet if we can relax into the chaos that is life, if we can live with the insecurity of not knowing, if we can accept the unpredictability of it all, then the amazing thing is this chaos is so beautiful. And if life were not a chaos, it would be dull.

If everything were predictable, it would not need to be lived. And so it is no surprise that life is a chaos. It is only by being a chaos that it is worth living. It is an adventure. It is an unfolding experience. We can keep exploring till the end of our days and we will never tire. For life is always fresh. It is always new. Nature always has a surprise in store for us, and we should welcome it. This is what makes life alive. Anything else would be dead. It would not be worthy of the name life.

So let's celebrate the fact that life is a chaos and acknowledge that it is a beautiful chaos.