Chaos and being alive

dispatch 13

Jan 05, 2022

Hi all!

The year is new! This year I’m noticing how every single article, newsletter, social media post, etc that I’ve read over the last few weeks has been very pointedly against New Year’s resolutions and their brethren. It feels like we’re collectively feeling towards new ways and methods of celebration that don’t involve a forced need to improve ourselves. An acknowledgment that survival is enough.

Today’s essay was written a few weeks back when I came across a notebook with all of my hopeful plans for 2021, right as the year was ending. This past year was a doozy that I couldn’t have predicted, and it was also exactly rug-pull I needed. I am grateful for the chaos, and that gratitude only grows.

One last note! All subscription dollars from snoozeletter’s paid subscription in December went to a fundraiser for my local Community Recovery Center. With your help and the support of other generous donors, I raised over $350 and managed to keep myself out of the frozen lake! Thank you so much! Want to subscribe for additional dispatches (one arrives next week!) and access to my full archive? Check out the available plans below. If you’d like to read additional dispatches but money is keeping you from signing up, shoot me an email and I’ll make sure they get your way.

One image of strange attractor. A complex swirling grey 3-d figure against a white background. — One image of a strange attractor…science is way rad! (Image from this site)

Chaos and being alive

I just finished reading a book that touched on chaos theory, Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science. And I must start with the regretful admission that I cannot yet explain chaos theory to you in words. I can only speak to what it has meant to me, and while that may not hold much scientific water, I don’t think that matters. I am not a scientist. Still, this book changed me, brought a sense of comfort that I didn’t expect when I opened it. The kind of recognition of belief that I always envied among the truly religious. What must that be like, believing in something that much? In the book, the author showed images of Strange Attractors. These images are self-portraits, drawn by systems in chaos and at first they are just that, chaos. There is no rhyme or reason to them, no pattern. But over time, they form a shape. An order, inherent in the chaos. It was always building something, long before we could recognize what it was.

It’s is a simplistic explanation, and somehow the best explanation of a life that I have ever heard. So often, and especially in these last few years, things feel fucking impossible like they are falling apart quicker than we can reach out to grasp them. We sit in the chaos of change and it feels endless and painful. And yet the moments of my life that brought the most hurt have also been the most transformative. This may sound reductive but it is also the truth, or a truth anyway. The one that I choose.

At the end of last year, I took a visioning workshop. More simply, I sat in my Zoom square, amongst strangers in their Zoom squares as we all tried to make sense of what might happen next. I tried, in an hour and a half, to create a simple and linear trail I could follow to the things I want and all the ways that I was sure I would improve myself with this fresh start and all of its attendant discipline. There were many exercises that I did in that workshop, imagining a creative future for myself within the container of 2021. Opening up to that sense of possibility that a new year or any other fresh start always brings. Next year, I can be anything. Now, that year is gone.

As these things go, my plans fell away by February as I became overwhelmed with life and secure in thinking I had so much time. I sit writing this on a morning in December, when the year is almost done and there is light snow and I am holding the notebook from that workshop in my hands, finally opening it again. It’s become a time capsule to a version of myself that already feels so far away. Time is exacting that way. And with the distance, there is a sweetness to this kind of reflection, a recognition of my own earnestness, the soft center of me that I can’t often name but has kept me alive. These pages are filled with so much hope.

On one page I had listed what worked and did not work for me in 2020. My handwriting is careful and small as I list what held me: Max, my friends, cooking, running, photography. Next, a longer list of the things I wanted to release: restriction, overworking, judgment, social media, letting others dictate my boundaries, the way I fear being perceived unless I have personally crafted the perception. From the distance of a year, these lists are reminders. To caretake this love, to pick up my camera, to put down my phone. To ground into my body, to release, to listen.

I turn a page and find a list of what I wanted to accomplish in 2021. A list that made me laugh out loud, left me smiling as absurdity always does. Of the seventeen things listed, most have come to pass though many in ways that I could not have predicted.

#16: Get a raise. I got one 3 months before I was laid off.
#12: Stop overworking. See above note.
#3: Get paid to write for the first time: In the generative space that rest cleared in my life, I started this very newsletter.
#10: Be closer to my mother: A health scare in early 2021 brought a new sweetness and vulnerability to our relationship. We need each other and for the first time I think, we are willing to name that.
#5: Start a garden. The joy of my year and a steadfast teacher.
#7: Learn to bake bread. I haven’t had much luck, but I keep trying because it brings me joy.

If you had asked me to write the journey of this year, what all of these would have looked like, I could never have done it. The ideas I had were so linear, so small. I couldn’t see the wheel turning, shaping this new life between its hands. Life is strange and winding and sometimes it gives you exactly what you ask for, but in a package you would never have chosen. But, it is the right one somehow. It is the only one that could have brought me right here, placed me on a path to what happens next.

And that’s something like fate, I guess. In the science of the Strange Attractor, there is the truth that while countless paths and patterns are possible, they will all wind up existing within this larger pattern or shape. This merger of free will and fate feels comforting to me. There are so many choice points that we face every day, but I like to believe that no matter what I chose I was always coming here. That even right now I am shifting towards what comes next. That in the moments of chaos, I just can’t see the order yet. I can’t fuck it up, none of us can, even when that feels like all we’re doing.

This year was impossible. This year tested me, tested all of us, in ways that we never imagined. But in the end, a year is just a container, a way of looking at things. A way of staying in a moment because we can’t see the long tail of the story yet.

This year I did not buy a new notebook or spend an hour on Zoom with my lists. All I want to take with me is a reminder to not get so tied down in the little choices. I am not in control, no matter how carefully I craft an illusion that says otherwise. I’m welcoming this year with curiosity because I truly do not have any idea of what it might hold.

So dear readers and friends, welcome to this New Year, to this fresh container if you want it, this continuation if you need it. I claim this year for the old gods and the new. For the stories of our lives that we just can’t see yet. For the dreams we clamp down because we feel we shouldn’t dare, that grow within us anyway until they reach right out of our mouths. For the inevitability of change. For the beauty and the strange ordering of chaos. For this life with all of its brambles, its griefs, and its triumphs. For another year of living for those of us lucky enough to still be right here.

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