I had an interesting experience with certainty on Saturday night. I went to a Democratic Socialists of America teach-in where they discussed how veganism feeds anticapitalism and vice versa. They served dinner and I was SURE I’d be able to eat almost nothing because while I’m vegan, I don’t eat onions and garlic, which are basically in everything. It turns out they ordered food from one of a handful of restaurants that don’t cook with those ingredients!
And then on the way home, all the transit apps said my bus was on time (it wasn’t). I was certain I’d missed my connecting bus because of the delay, which, again, all of the transit apps said would be the case, but I didn’t! The connecting bus was also late, which meant I waited a grand total of 2 minutes rather than the 15 I begrudgingly anticipated. Here was the trickster working in my favor. I usually think of the trickster as the disruptive force that makes it rain on your wedding day, but sometimes the trickster can work to your benefit.
These experiences around uncertainty reminded me of a quote a friend shared. Painter Paul Cézanne said, “We live in a rainbow of chaos.” I don’t know about you but I don’t naturally associate “rainbow” with “chaos.” I don’t think of chaos and unpredictability as beautiful. I think of them as dark, ugly, something to be avoided at all costs. But that’s not the full story, is it? As the Post-It note on my bathroom mirror says, “Remember: Life can be surprising and delightful.”
Is it a rainbow? Yes? It is chaos? Also yes. Photo by Luca Upper on Unsplash
Life can be chaotic and beautiful. Uncertain and joyful. It’s all of it. Life is a broad range of experiences and I do better when I embrace that. There’s a psychological concept that supports this called emodiversity, which means letting yourself feel an abundant range of emotions – not just the pleasant ones. A study of 37,000 people found that those who do that have better mental health, decreased depression, better physical health, and know how to handle a wide range of behavioral situations.
Diversity is the name of the game over and over again. Diversity in emotions. Diversity in the gut microbiome. Diversity in the gene pool. We are stronger with diversity. My spiritual teacher says:
“Some people say that disparity is the order of nature; therefore, there must be differences between one group and another, between rich and poor, etc. However, such a proposition is fundamentally incorrect. Instead, it is correct to say that diversity is the order of providence. One must remember that identicality is disowned by nature – nature will not support identicality. Whenever identicality occurs, a sort of structural explosion takes place and the entire structure is broken into pieces. So diversity is the law of nature and identicality can never be.”
He’s talking specifically about social structures but the concept also applies to our internal diversity, or in this case, our internal range of emotions and experiences. Life is meant to be a rainbow of chaos, and instead of becoming something to fear, I’m learning it’s something I can enjoy.
I dream of a world where we recognize the only certainty we’ll ever have is that life is uncertain. A world where we understand chaos and unpredictability don’t have to be bad things. A world where we embrace our full range of emotions and accept diversity internally and externally. A world where we remember we live in a rainbow of chaos.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.
No one would describe me as a clumsy person. In fact, it’s just the opposite. I took ballet for years and my reflexes are quick but in the last week, I’m a veritable butterfingers. Objects are literally jumping from my hands. I was in a store the other day and my credit card flew across the counter six feet away and got wedged between a table and the wall. I opened a package and the contents skittered across my kitchen floor.
More energy is coursing through my system, my mind and body are going in a million different directions, and I can’t seem to sit still. Again, that’s highly unusual for me! I generally don’t have problems with focus but these days my insides (and outsides, honestly) feel chaotic, messy, and discombobulated. Normally I’d try to tamp all this down and rein the energy back in but I keep thinking about what my chiropractor tells me about this phase of my healing: “You’re reorganizing.” I’m like a tornado picking up objects and hurtling them to another location.
What I like about this photo is it reminds me of the Pillars of Creation. Photo by Angel Luciano on Unsplash
The question worth asking is, “What will be created from all this disarray?” There’s a quote on my fridge from Friedrich Nietzsche that says, “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” So often chaos is painted as scary, undesirable, something to avoid at all costs but as Reggie Ray, the spiritual director of the Dharma Ocean, said in a dharma talk, “Chaos is the source of life.”
Oooooh boy. Chaos is the source of life? It’s not order and structure? Sadly, no. As we are all aware, we are made up of stardust, to paraphrase Carl Sagan. To quote an article on the subject:
“The carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms in our bodies, as well as atoms of all other heavy elements, were created in previous generations of stars over 4.5 billion years ago. Because humans and every other animal as well as most of the matter on Earth contain these elements, we are literally made of star stuff.”
What that means is we’re the product of chaos. All the debris from supernovas exploding and comets colliding led to us. It also led to some of the things we consider the most precious. Ultra-high precision analyses of some of the oldest rock samples on Earth by researchers at the University of Bristol provide clear evidence that “the planet’s accessible reserves of precious metals are the result of a bombardment of meteorites more than 200 million years after Earth was formed.” Gold? Platinum? Both here because of meteors.
In my spiritual tradition, we use the word “clash” a lot, which describes the meeting of opposing forces. If you think about it, that’s basically what chaos is. One force is striving for order, the familiar, the steady whereas another is calling for disorder, the new, the unsteady. My spiritual teacher says, “Whenever there is clash or conflict within any structure, whether subtle or crude, it acquires subtlety. This applies to both psychic clash and physical clash. The more subtle the crude mind becomes as a result of internal clash, the greater its spiritual awakening.”
What’s happening to me, I think, is another spiritual awakening where I’m becoming more myself but to create that new me requires some chaos.
I dream of a world where we understand to create something new, including ourselves, requires chaos sometimes. A world where we recognize there may be gold waiting for us at the end of an unstable period. A world where we realize internal clash and conflict is an asset, spurring spiritual growth.
Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.