Consider the Chaos (in Ourselves and our World)

David Foster Wallace, the brilliant writer who died in 2008, wrote an essay titled  “Consider the Lobster.” I say let us consider the Chaos. which is actually related to D.F. Wallace.  (His suicide resulted from his internal mental state of Chaos-depression and self-hate.)

Inadvertently, our actions lead to Chaos in many small ways everyday- accidentally taking an extra playbill at the theatre, allowing the faucet to run too long. For the most part, these instances are unavoidable and need not overwhelm us.

But I’d like to pose the question, Would our world be different if we purposefully aim to diminish the Chaos and, in its place, substitute  order?

Let us start with our intra-psychic self (of which D.F. Wallace was a victim).

Our relationship with our own psyche has the potential to add order or the opposite, Chaos, to our lives. If we accept our efforts, we add order and energy as we plug away at our daily tasks. If we declare our efforts insufficient or “never enough,” we actually may work against ourselves and become our own worst enemy.

For example, Ms. C., an artist, suffers from self hate and depression. She doesn’t feel she deserves to be successful or loved.  Factors in her early environment failed (in some way) to support her talent and healthy psychological development. She doesn’t see a purpose in her life in spite of  her gift to create art and can’t “take in” the positive feedback she receives from the outside world.

Self-hate is like an eraser at the end of a pencil that wipes out a person’s accomplishments, rendering them imperceptible to the achiever. Like the reverse of the Hans C. Andersen story of the emperor and his new clothes, we outsiders perceive accomplishments that remain invisible or imperceptible to the achiever.

For a person who hasn’t grappled with self hate or depression the “erasing phenomenon” may seem incomprehensible.

Our intimate relationships can have the effect of adding Chaos and/or order to our lives. In fact, they probably cause the pendulum between the two states to swing back and forth, from moment to moment. In the final analysis though, a “good-enough” relationship adds a sense of increased order to our internal and external worlds.

In Tennessee Williams’s great play,  TheGlass Menagerie, currently running on Broadway, the mother, Ms. Wingfield embodies the tragic example of  a mother whose words create Chaos in her offspring. She achieves the opposite of an agenda she espouses, namely to want the best for her children. In bragging about her past accomplishments, and nagging them about their inadequacies, she undermines their self-esteem, driving them into their own private world of fantasy, detached from the “real world.”

The character of Ms. Wingfield  reveals a gapping flaw:  she lacks  self-awareness. If Ms. Wingfield were aware of her unconscious motives-to diminish her children in order to gird herself (against unconscious self hate- she might choose to change her tactics. Awareness grants choice and in turn, offers order.

Chaos has been generally viewed as a negative and order as the goal, but a recent article about Chaos in the New York Times Magazine (Clean up Your Desk! by Gretchen Reynolds, September 22) complicates the dichotomy. The author summarizes a recent study at the University of Minnesota (published online in Psychological Science last month) documenting the effect of messy and neat office environments on college students. The study found that a less- than- neat environment led to an increase in creative thinking, while a neat environment enhanced productivity. In other words, an advantage can be found in both order and Chaos.

Perhaps a valid goal is to consider organized Chaos, a situation   in which we’re sufficiently ordered to be able to connect thoughts, actions, and events, yet open enough to allow novelty.

 Awareness is the master key that opens the doors to increased order.  By contrast, lack of awareness adds Chaos to the psyche, the interpersonal world.

(For me, writing a daily journal is a powerful tool that increases my self-awareness and diminishes the Chaos and disorder in my mind.) 

Conclusion: The common denominator of awareness adds order to the physical, mental and spiritual levels while the absence of awareness adds Chaos. The process, of course, is unending, as infinite (we hope) as the ebb and flow of our oceans.

Dear Reader, I welcome your thoughts on this complex cycle.

Jsimon145@gmail.com.