Thank you for the post and comments about embracing chaos. They are pertinent to my life at the moment and well received!

Chaos, to me, seems unavoidable for anyone wanting to maximize the experiences they have in life. Other people may not perceive that our lives are chaotic, but our own interpretation of what is happening to us results in us believing that we are in the middle of chaos (to use Tara’s example, children, I am told regularly keep their parents up all night when they are first born, but knowing that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to accept). As you say, chaos, or the feeling that we are living in chaos, teaches us to stop trying to control situations that are beyond our control.

BTW, I’ve been to Burning Man, and despite what popular opinion would suggest, it is not at all chaotic, although, being somewhat of a prude by conventional standards, it did teach me about not getting freaked out about things over which I have no control ;0)

I’m late in the game here…way behind on my blog reading, etc.

Okay…so…I totally understand where you are coming from.

Now, contrary to Shelley’s very hilarious characterization of what ‘embrace the chaos’ is about, I don’t actually feel like anyone should forget about ‘embracing responsibility’ (pure Shelley genius).

When I say, embrace the chaos and take risks, I don’t mean that you should forget stuff like “Man, I’ve got to pay my mortgage”, etc. I don’t even mean to let go metaphorically and just roll with the punches the universe throws at you. Sometimes you have to be proactive and smart and plan and fight back. Yes.

I’m mostly instructing a very long history of people holding onto their ‘10 Steps to Success’ with blue-knuckles and ‘indisputable formulas’ who just cannot understand why people don’t act the way they want them to act.

When I say embrace the chaos, I mean like a Mom just ‘lets go’ and lets her kids be kids: messy, germ-y and all. Talk about chaos. I figured out the hard way. My son was going to be absolutely perfect and I read every book known to motherkind and I was going to do everything right. It made it that much harder for me to understand why he was still screaming at 4 a.m. after I fed him, changed him, bounced him, etc.

When I let go of my need to be perfect, things got so much better. And I even started to understand what his needs were.

I don’t know. Lots of people, even in this comment section, want to water it down. Not chaos, change. Not chaos, flexibility. Not chaos, challenge. Etc. Whatever you want to call it (and that is a bit of an issue of control itself, having squabbles over semantics), it’s chaos to me. It’s what I cannot control so the more I embrace that fact, the more I can face it when it happens. And when stuff turns out perfect? I can enjoy it even more.

In physics, chaos is described as: behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions. Sounds like alot like life to me.

Absolutely, think skeptically about chaos. Absolute chaos isn’t the answer (and I never said, “live chaotically”, I said, “embrace the chaos”, which just means you are prepared for anything, not that you run naked through fields of flowers - ugh, I can’t even bear the thought of going to Burning Man lest I am compelled to bare skin).

Sure I market. I’m in marketing. But embracing the chaos isn’t about marketing TO. It’s about letting go of rules and ‘conventional wisdom’ and understanding the world within a single ideological framework.

Okay…I’ve blathered enough. Sorry my chaotic ramblings are making you feel insecure. I hate that feeling, too. Yikes.

To me, chaos implies a lack of understanding of those things that are happening around and to us. Notice I didn’t say control. You don’t have to have control to prevent a feeling of chaos (and who really has control anyway).

My two cents..

I think most people these days have not seen real chaos, if they did, they’d crap their pants. Think war zone only worse.

Instead of embrace the chaos, I propose, embrace late binding and flexibility. Of course not all personality types can handle that.

When a marathon runner works to go faster, longer, she or he doesn’t do so by running around in circles. It’s a disciplined effort to continue to push to be a little better. There is no chaos in it.

I think that if challenge generates chaos, perhaps the challenge isn’t so much to make one better, as to make one different. The chaos is reflected in that there’s a conflict between what you really want, and what life has given you, or is forcing on you.

Tim, surfing the wave–I like that metaphor. And sometimes you wipe out really bad or even “pearl your board” (my husband did that once, I think it means breaking your board in half).

Dave, sometimes I like the way I organize my blog posts and sometimes I don’t. This one came out pretty well but I’ve had many that don’t. So don’t beat yourself up about it, the great thing about blogging is that each post is relatively transient

Challenging oneself has nothing to do with chaos, and everything to do with one’s strength of purpose and determination to push our limits in order to be or do better. It is totally incompatible with chaos, which we assume means that the person is supposed to just leap into life and hope to hell it works out.

The flaw I see in the embracing chaos school is that you can’t let go of all your beliefs. I can’t anyway. And when your belief and reality don’t match, the symptoms you describe take charge. It’s called cognitive dissonance and, at its worst, can make you want to puke in your shoes. Your beliefs create boundaries and trying to cross those boundaries while simultaneously holding on to the belief creates stress. One thing I’ve done is write down things I believe as opposed to things I want to gain (emotional as well as physical) to see where they don’t align. Then the question is less about whether to embrace chaos and more about which beliefs I am willing to give up.