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[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.