Chaos reworked
Mogollon Rim
Every night, I open my outlook calendar to see what awaits me the next day. A few things go through my mind. Who am I meeting with, am I scheduled to speak, are there any engagements that necessitate a certain dress code. I need to do this every day or I won’t sleep well. Are you like this? If you aren’t aware or in the know about what is happening next does it effect your wellbeing? Yesterday, after an 8 mile hike near the Mogollon Rim just north of Payson, AZ my wife and I listened to a podcast by Brie Patreon called The Dark Night of the Soul with Mirabai Starr. Brie’s podcast is called Unknowing and from what I can gather it discusses living in this space of not knowing and growing through it, or as she describes it on her website:
“For some time now, I have been exploring how Unknowing can be embraced as a choice—a practice—as the necessary (and ass-kicking) initiation of every beautiful, unexpected, emergent possibility in our lives and in social transformation.”
That podcast coupled with hiking a fairly difficult trail in the wilderness got me thinking that often times, unknowing can be equated to chaos. To live in the way of unknowing even in the smallest of details, like what is going on tomorrow, can cause me stress. But what if, like Brie and her guest discussed in this recent episode, we can actually find a depth of understanding through our own unknowing making us stronger and more resilient? I know as a trauma informed writer that this can often be considered post-traumatic growth. Where something horrible happened to us, it didn’t break us, it made us stronger. Could the chaos of unknowing do the same for us? Can unknowing what tomorrow brings leave room for spontaneous events, new found relationships and many more things beneficial to me? I think it could. I want to rework my chaos into something profound. Not knowing, can lead to curiosity and excitement. At times not knowing leaves us with the sense of awe that we certainly long for in our everyday lives.
Don’t get me wrong, we need organization, most of us reading this live in a dog eat dog world where only the strong and highly organized survive but what if it was just a day to day thing. You don’t have to completely figure out the rest of your life today! Let some of the unknowing settle into your bones as a substance for the good. Allow yourself to venture into the world a bit without it all figured out and see what happens! In a world saturated with the scrolling news cycle telling you about all that is going on around the world at breakneck speed, let’s you and me sit in the easy chair of the unknowing today. Rocking back and forth simply wondering what tomorrow might bring.
