osmosis

I just read On being crazy, which I dug out of the blogs of note today.

it makes me wonder: hm. I don't suffer like that from any crushing depression. does that mean i'll never change the world? do you have to be really crazy and in pain to make a difference to humanity?

perhaps that's silly of me.

someone told me last week, "The whole world and everything in it is just trying to return to a state of chaos." so I wrote down, on the back of a folded sheet of paper, chaos/nature. "And what's the opposite of chaos?" the someone continued. "Order. And order must be maintained." and I wrote down, order must be maintained, and proceeded to scribble synonyms around my two poles as the instructor elaborated.

order
calm, peace, sense, plans, construct, science, rules, conformity, control, learning, progress, sameness, mainstream... 

chaos
wild, madness, pain, unruly, death, darkness, carnal, filth, dissolusion, barbarism, falling apart... sickness... gravity...

on my white halfsheet of paper the words aren't listed so nicely. they're all over the place and there's a large gap inbetween the mess of orderly synonyms and the mess of chaotic ones. in that gap I thoughtfully put down a little vs. in heavy black strokes.

vs.
competition, give & take, flexibility, experiments, between, cyclical, balance...

order must be maintained. nothing stays clean by itself. in fact, nothing stays clean.

so we have our brooms and dishclothes and soap and water. we work. we struggle to maintain the order of our lives. without the chaos what would we have to struggle against? you can't avoid it. embrace the chaos. it is rather beautiful stuff, isn't it?

neglect the order?

but you can't. why can't you?

that would be like giving in. giving up. but... so is conforming to this 'order' you keep talking about.

well, then, considering you have to give in to one of the two, why not make it something worthwhile? chaos happens by itself. you can't take any credit for that. your mum will shout at you for having a floor covered with laundry anyway. but people will at least take notice if all your books are obsessively arranged by color and size along the shelves in your den. maybe.

there are all kinds of order. not all of them are mainstream, but all of them have rules. everything has rules. maybe even chaos has rules. without boundaries, how does anything exist at all?