Everyday, you expend energy cleaning up, tidying up, sorting out, arranging, putting away, and a variety of other names for ordering the chaos of living.
Straightening up the kitchen, hanging up your clothes, putting away the groceries, picking up the living room, scheduling your days and weeks in appointment books, calendars or phones, sequencing your goals and strategies, organizing your paperwork and bills, looking in the TV Guide to determine how to arrange your evening, sorting out what you have and what you need for the next week’s meals, and on and on . . .
In today’s world, there is so much to put into place, you’ve probably acclimated to the idea that feeling overwhelmed has to be a daily visitor knocking on your door.
This leads to a sense of impending chaos, a tightening of control, and often fear of losing your way. The result? Losing sight of your purpose for doing it all in the first place.
In this state of frustration, exhaustion, and fear, you find yourself scrambling even more to get your life in order — once and for all.
At often breakneck speed, you find yourself racing from one task to another, hurrying to out run the ever encroaching chaos. You believe this will keep your life from falling into a complete uproar of bedlam, pandemonium, and madness.
This, of course, causes immense stress, decreases the effectiveness of the immune system, extends a less than polite but continual invitation for exhaustion and illness, and usually closes the door for good communication, clear thinking, and compassion for yourself and others.
To sum it all up: you may actually feel like a hamster running round and round on that ever turning wheel having forgotten why you’re doing it and what your life is actually all about. Seeking to create orderliness means you are also wanting to find a sense of peace, harmony, and security. Yet the result of “ever faster” and “more” and “better” is actually confusion, turmoil, and insecurity.
When you’re lacking clarity and feeling wobbly about what you’re doing in your life, where you’re going with it, and who you think you are, stop a moment and realize you are in the grips of yet another Unresolvable Dilemma.
Emerging Marketplace Mystics know that Unresolvable Dilemmas call for a different approach and an altogether different strategy.
Managing This Unresolvable Dilemma
An Unresolvable Dilemma is defined by the presence of an interdependent polar pair of opposites. Because order and chaos actually define one another, they cannot be separated and thus are interdependent. The easiest way to manage this Unresolvable Dilemma is to understand the dynamic unfolding between the two options.
Chaos is pulled into being by one life force that moves to destabilize any steady state.
Order is pulled into being by the opposite life force that moves to stabilize any changing state.
When these two forces are free to engage in the continual process of re-balancing, creativity arises out of the rhythmic movement between the two. Creativity can be described as a gap in a habitual way of thinking or perceptual patterning.
In order for creativity to arise, any stable state will have to be disrupted to allow a new pattern to arise. And, the disrupted state will have to be stabilized for the new pattern to arise and be perceived. This means disruption and stability are two sides of the same coin.
A creative act unleashes the joy of human expression. Whether we call this learning, discovering, growing, or awakening, it is dependent on the deep partnership between chaos and order.
The appropriate strategy here is to relax in the presence of both chaos and order. Too much chaos results in anarchy and pandemonium. Too much order results in rigidity and fixation. Just the right amount of balance between the two allows creativity to arise. In this gap of possibility, the new thought, insight, feeling, discovery, innovation or invention, becomes free to emerge.
Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.
—Jose Ortega y Gasset, Mirabeau and Politics, 1927
Life is a creative process unfolding. Understanding chaos and order from a paradoxical perspective allows you to be privy to the nature of creativity itself — and thus the freedom to become immersed in its arising and embraced by its joy.
If you’re not yet aware of my on-line training designed to give you this precise strategy, click here for details on The Mystic’s Wisdom De-Coded 12 week program.
Enjoy discovering how this dance frees the magic of your own creativity to unfold.
Much love,
Ragini
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