What if we Embrace the Chaos?
It’s natural, after all.
A co-worker came into my office the other day just fit to be tied (as my grandmother would say). She was frustrated, angry, highly annoyed. She gestured, she breathed rapidly, she had that tone. You could see it in her eyes and her stance.
She had to get it out. She was just blowing off steam. For every deflection we tried, she had an answer. She was wound up.
And I felt it the rest of the evening.
My chest was tight and a little tender. I knew I had not only recognized the emotion and energy she put out, I absorbed it. I took it in.
This is something I’ve struggled with all my life, but only recently been able to really understand and put a name to. Throughout high school and college, friends would always tell me I was “too sensitive” and as a blunt definition, it’s fairly accurate.
The concept of empaths and highly sensitive people has likely been around for centuries, but thanks to the internet, you can find like-minded folks online no matter where you live and it can help you realize that you aren’t alone with what you’ve been grappling.
Highly sensitive people are incredibly in-tune to the environment around us. We can walk into a room and without a word being spoken think, “Man, someone is pissed off in here.”
We sense the energies coming from people and in some cases, take them into ourselves and feel them as our own.
I’ve seen and heard of ways to combat this. There are mental exercises where you imagine a mirror or some other strong-material shell surrounding you to keep those emotions out. I know about this. And when my co-worker unleashed her ire, I thought to myself, come on. You know how to deal with this. Put up your metaphysical mirror. Where’s that protective egg you’ve heard so much about? You don’t have to feel this if you would just learn to guard against it.
If I am able to recognize and share the fact that I am a highly sensitive person, possibly empathic as well, I have to be able to deal with everything that entails. And protecting myself from absorbing the emotions around me should be my number one goal.
Right?
A few days after the event, I went for an acupuncture appointment. I’ve been going for acupuncture and looking into Traditional Chinese Medicine for about ten years now and it has changed my perspective on a whole lot of aspects of my life and I never really know what each appointment will bring.
Interestingly enough, we were both about five minutes late and laughed about it for a bit. My acupuncturist said she was watching a video of her former teacher and even though she knew she needed to leave the house, something made her finish watching.
Only after the fact do I realize why all of this happened. Once again, the universe has shown me there are no accidents.
She shared the video with me. In it, her former teacher has with him a chaos pendulum, sometimes called a double pendulum. It’s essentially a pendulum with another pendulum attached to its end and looks like the figure on the left.
A chaos pendulum is a concept in physics and mathematics and the motion, as you can see, is quite obviously chaotic. There’s no real way to predict how it will move. It needs a force to get it started and it will eventually come to a stop, but the motion of it is pretty hypnotic (at least it was for me).
As I stared at the pendulums swinging back and forth, the man in the video explained the motion is really the motion of life. It’s unpredictable, uncertain, somewhat aimless.
When the pendulum is at rest, it’s a straight line. Many of us think that we should focus on that straight line. Certainly that’s the way life should be, right? Comfortable, known, easy to understand. We don’t want it to be messy, complicated, disheveled.
I’m reminded of Master Shifu from Kung Fu Panda 2 and his search for inner peace. I, like him, believed that inner peace came from a calm quiet — not only inside, but outside as well. The hush of a forest. The serenity of a meadow. The composure of a sunset.
Sigh. Can’t you just feel the inner peace?
Those moments are nice. Those moments are necessary, but as my acupuncturist says, if we live life in a straight line, it usually means we’re dead.
Life is a roller coaster; a perpetual back-and-forth, up-and-down. When we cling too tightly to the placid and comfortable moments and can’t accept it when the coaster swings back the other way, we are actually going against what life is.
Nature isn’t static. It isn’t composed. It isn’t stagnant. Look at the photo from Jonas Denil on Unsplash at the beginning of this article. That wave crashing against the shore isn’t a straight line. That’s power. That’s raw energy. You can almost feel it and hear it, can’t you?
That’s nature. It’s natural.
It’s in constant motion, whether we can see it with the naked eye or not. Leaves, flowers, grass, plants are continually evolving. They’re moving somewhere along the spectrum of birth and death, spring to winter.
Tides are ebbing and flowing with the moon. Storms rise and fall with barometric pressure.
Nature is a chaos pendulum.
That little epiphany brought on a relatively profound “ah-ha” moment for me. So, let me say it again: nature is a chaos pendulum. Our natural state is the unpredictable swing of that pendulum.
That’s life.
Co-workers will come into your office and blow up. A spouse will have had a bad day and make a snarky comment. A child will have a tantrum and it’ll bleed right into you. You’ll witness a customer and a clerk exchange in a verbal sparring match in a Walmart.
That’s going to happen. I don’t usually make a lot of guarantees in life, but that’s one you can probably take to the bank.
Because that kind of unpredictability is nature itself.
So instead of fighting against it, what if we simply went with it? Ride the wave, so to speak.
What if instead of berating myself for absorbing my co-worker’s issues, I accepted the fact that it happened and gave myself the me-time I needed to shake off that energy? I could meditate, do qi-gong, get in some yoga stretches, go for a walk, or even just physically shake out my hands and get rid of it.
That critical inner voice in my head loves to hear itself talk. It natters on throughout the day, questioning things and whispering in that sibilant way it has that maybe that wasn’t the right way to do that or what would your mom say or do you think that person might be mad at you?
Ugh. So irritating.
I don’t need to give that freakin’ voice any more ammunition. I don’t need to give it the chance to murmur it’s favorite phrase: you failed again.
Craziness is around us. Especially in the world we live in today. At any given moment, madness is right around the corner. And no matter how much we think we can predict it, we really don’t know where it could come from or when — because just like the motion of that pendulum, we don’t know how it’s going to fall.
What if instead of being on constant alert to fight it off, we embrace it? When the chaos comes (and it will) what if we see it, acknowledge it, accept it and let it be?
Some days if we’ve had enough time to ourselves and done enough practice, it won’t stick to us. Other days, it will — and that’s okay, too.
Because on those days we’re affected, we’ll know that we need to go inward, take a step back at some point and heal ourselves with whatever practice works for us.
There’s no need for self-derision if it bleeds through. Some days it’ll happen. Like that famous saying: Some days you’re the windshield and some days you’re the bug.
Embrace whatever happens in the wake of the chaos and keep going.
I sometimes think the more we fight against something, the more energy we lose in the battle. Particularly when we’re combatting nature itself.
If we truly believe there are no accidents in life, then embracing the chaos only makes sense.
Anyone else with me? Chaos Party 2021?
I’ll bring the pendulum.
