Managing Chaos – Orderly Disorder
Fourteen furry critters on the end of fourteen colorful leashes, tangled together and held firmly by two gentle and patient hands. Not exactly the site you expect to come across when you turn a corner on the local bike path. These pups are walked and cared for by a couple of local women whose hearts are obviously greater than the bodies that hold them.
I savor scenes such as these held in the recesses of my mind to be retrieved and paralleled with life’s quirky moments while concepts cross my thoughts. So as chaos challenges my world of words, images and ideas I stressfully contemplate just how I am to put order into my disordered self and bring it safely away from the danger zone of too much information packed into too little memory.
I typically do not get frazzled by things not working out and going in all directions, but as I try to manage my world and meet self imposed deadlines I find myself not so gentle, calm and patient as the dear women handling chaos at the end of their colorful leashes. Is there a magical trick to managing chaos or is the trick simply to get rid of it? This would be unrealistic. There will always be some chaos in life, for that is what keeps us on our toes. But, the fact is that sometimes it is unrealistic to hope for more hands to come along and take over tasks that are difficult to manage on our own. Therefore we must learn to simply deal with them ourselves.
As I watched those women gracefully manage the uncontrolled I could see that they did not look at these dogs as a burden but rather a blessing, and because of this they handled them differently. Instead of yanking and pushing the little ones they would gently pull and direct them. As a result the team moved as one traveling in the same direction and in harmony with one another. Maybe that was the solution to controlled chaos and molding order from disorder. I truly love lessons of parallel metaphors that come from wandering down a path and an opening of the eyes and mind. Just a thought!
In Other’s Words
There is no order in the world around us, we must
adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
~ Vonnegut~