Reposted from March 8, 2024 with addendum
Transformation comes out of chaos.
Is this true? I’ve been thinking about it lately. I imagine two different scenarios which inform transformation, whether personally (e.g. health, financial, sense of purpose, search for meaning), or in larger social, cultural and political situations (e.g. wars in Ukraine and Israel-Palestine, full civil rights for women, LGBTQIA, the differently abled, Biracial, Indigenous and People of Color–addendum–political violence against a former President of the US).
The first scenario is the one where for the person or people involved, everything is in good order. There is order, organization, timing, resources, predictability–basically, a homeostasis in all things. If I as an individual am living that short of life where everything is in place, I am NOT looking for transformation. Why would I? Everything is in place. And, if I am a part of a majority of people in a community, city, state or nation where pretty much everything is in order, why would I want things to change? I would only be looking for transformation if all those things begin to dysfunction, to fall apart–or I begin to notice those for whom nothing is in place, and that so disturbs my world that I begin looking for, working for change.
The second scenario is the one that we find after the first one has blown up. Nothing is really in order anymore. Nothing can be predicted or expected. Resources are scarce. Organizations don’t function and order has collapsed. When things are that bad, what we begin to find are pieces of our previous existence that we didn’t even know were there, all along, and from those we begin to rise up.
I know that transformation happens in the second scenario. Human history is full of examples both on the collective as well as the personal level: out of the ashes, human endeavor and creativity arise to build something new, to do better, and maybe for a while, to be better. Clearly, in that sense, chaos is required for transformation to take place.
I’m wondering about the first scenario. While most of my personal world is still in order, can I hear the call coming from those who are already in the ashes? I think (I want to hope) there is that possibility. If there is, I think it may be because compassion comes. Before the chaos.
~Bob Patrick
This sounds right. There seems to be an alignment between the depth of destruction and our ability to rise up and try yet again, with a different purpose in mind. The former ways of life become extinct, we evolve, we try to catch up with our new selves ( such as after a pandemic) then we are faced with the new order. It all seems like a force of nature that overcomes us because we are not equipped to handle the speed and traction chaos brings to humanity. There have been enough times that chaos has won, enough times it has shown it’s ugly face for us to see its potential harm, enough days that it has eaten away at the order of our lives. If we can’t circumvent chaos, we need to get much better at transformation.