One Apple A Day #527 - chaos
"Babies are born in blood and chaos; stars and galaxies come into being amid the release of massive primordial cataclysms." — from Do the Work by Steven Pressfield
Chaos is scary because it is unpredictable. You can create the conditions for chaos to happen, but you can't design it. Our brain is a predicting machine. It continuously evaluates the situation to find clues that will trigger behaviour in response. In every moment, our brain tries to fit the complexity of the world within the map of reality it has built over time. But amidst chaos everything gets blurred and mixed up, clues are hard to find, and our mental framework becomes almost useless.
For all these reasons, chaos can't be modelled or replicated. So, it is hard to deliberately create chaos to solve a problem. Though, chaos is generative. Because we can't rely on what we know, we are forced to connect with the energy, to use our intuition and to trust.
Chaos challenges our beliefs, and in doing so, it helps us evolve beyond the boundaries of our mental framework.
"Unless some degree of chaos is permitted to enter the system, no further progress can be made. Sometimes, to create new structures, the old ones must be destroyed so the blocks can be recombined in different ways." — From Liminal Thinking by Dave Gray