[music]
The nature of life is that it contains both
chaos and order.
Patterns emerge from disorder and melt back
into it.
Your body is totally chaotic at certain levels
- swirling atoms of oxygen enter your bloodstream
with every breath, teeming enzymes and proteins
fill each cell, even the firing of neurons
in your brain is an electrical storm that
never ceases.
Yet this chaos is just one face of order,
for there is no doubt that our cells are masterpieces
of organized function.
Indeed, chaos and order exist so closely one
to the other that they cannot really be separated.
As German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
once said “You must have chaos within you
give birth to a dancing star.”
And that is literally true, for the swirling
primordial gases that formed the early universe
had to precede the birth of galaxies.
Early on these gases exhibited no pattern
at all, just the faintest tendency to be attracted
to one another.
Yet out of that faint hint of gravitational
pull, a chain of events was set into motion
that eventually led to the inception of human
DNA, a molecule so complex that to disturb
any one of its 3 billion genetic units could
make the difference between life and death.
On a personal scale, everyone struggles with
order and disorder.
Things have a tendency to fall apart; what
was fresh and ripe eventually decays; what
was young grows old and dies.
Those same faint tugs of gravity that created
dancing stars out of chaos exist at every
level of nature.
We can be certain that a rose seed will ultimately
grow into a rose, even though as a seedling
it may look no different from a bean or a
violet, and in seed form its only claim to
uniqueness may lie in minuscule twists of
its twin strands of DNA.
Modern life is so full of pressures pushing
this way and that, that most of us react by
trying to impose order upon it.
The problem is that all this struggle, worry,
planning, and controlling runs against the
grain of life.
Life compresses chaos and orderliness together.
You cannot have one without the other.
If you want to be in the flow of life, you
can’t struggle against it at the same time.
Perhaps your future consists of not one scenario
but all possible ones.
They branch out from the present moment like
invisible threads of potential.
If you can accept the flow of life and give
into it, you will be accepting what is real.
Only when you accept what is real can you
live with it in peace and happiness.
The alternative is a struggle that will never
end because it's a struggle with the unreal,
with a mirage of life instead of life itself.
