Have you ever wondered how we exist amidst all the change and chaos that seems to be swirling around us every day? It is amazing to me to look at the human experience and see how we have tried so hard to make neat little boxes of our lives. We constantly attempt to impose a sense of order on ourselves and the world around us. When we look closer, is this really order?
The concept of time is probably the one of the most interesting phenomenon to consider. Can you imagine life without time? Can you imagine a time when time didn't exist? Think about it. We use time to measure motion, to measure itself, to know when to get up, when to go to bed, when to work, and when to play. We know what time is, but try to describe it to someone else. We carry a wide array of clocks, appointment books and planners to keep us "on time", but what is time? Can you describe it without using some other force or object to define it? It seems a most perplexing issue to say the least. We created a clock and calendar based on the rotation of the earth around the sun and the moon around the earth, and we have created a system of measurement and terminology of years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, and so on. It seems that we have found a way to bring order from chaos, at least for the purposes of time.
The world we see, touch, feel, and hear is made up of even smaller worlds of swirling particles we can only imagine because they are too small to see on their own. It is amazing to me that when I am touching and looking at my kitchen table, which feels and looks solid to me, I am actually experiencing the whirling and swirling patterns of molecules, atoms, and sub atomic particles that make up that table. It seems each level of order is made up of a smaller layer of chaos. As human beings, we have built upon this pattern- order over chaos, chaos over order. We construct our buildings and institutions in rather consistent ratios and patterns that reflect our cultures' individual agreements on what order should be. Our concept of order is defined by the society in which we live, it is sculpted by the authority placed above us. We as a society agree that certain things should be a certain way, and we keep this agreement every day. Those who cannot keep this unwritten agreement end up running into trouble: via prisons and various institutions. It seems that some people are better "tuned" to the order of chaos than others are.
It seems to me, those who are more able to handle order are those who make the good "counters" of our society: the farmers, the shopkeepers, scientists, book keepers, bankers, etc, while those who are better able to hander chaos are the people who are the "creators" of our society: inventors, authors, artists, philosophers, hunters, etc. While both are equally important to the efficient running of society, there have always been more counters than creators, therefore those who fall on the creator side of things have always felt tremendous pressure to act more like counters, even when it goes against their nature to do so. I suspect there is a bit of counter and creator in all of us, though I am thinking that most of us lean one way or the other. Perhaps those who are at the extremes of counter (order) and the extremes of creators (chaos) are the ones most likely to end up "crazy" by our standards, because we would seem to need a balance of the two to exist within time.
I see humanity seeking the patterns in the chaos of our lives and trying to put a sense of order to these patterns. When you look at chaos, often it is like peeling an onion-for each layer of chaos we discover a layer of order underneath. It is possible there is no end to the layers of order and chaos. We exist in a constant dance of order and chaos, each pulling us in its own way. I belive every particle of the universe exists as an attempt to understand itself. The universe is to me a very living thing, it grows, it breathes, parts of it die just as other parts of are being born. The cycle of chaos and order plays itself out on a much grander scale than just here on Earth. The entire universe is a part of this great dance of unfolding and understanding. As with the universe, we human beings abhor stagnation, change is at the center of what we are, it is the nature of this change that we continue to probe, understand, order, and unfold, just as the vast universe itself does.