Chaos and Order

I haven’t written in my blog for so long I’ve wondered if I’d ever come back to it. A few people have asked me over the years if I continue to write though, and I mean to.

So, some thoughts.

The other day, a friend wondered if life has a plan, or if everything is chaos (I don't recall her question verbatim but this was the essence of it). I told her I didn’t think it was chaos, but wasn’t sure how to choose my words to explain what I thought, but I’ve found that I’ve come back to her question a few times.

These past few weeks have certainly felt chaotic. The world has, in large part, come to a standstill, and we as a species have been forced to realize just how fragile so many things in our society can be. These are things that we read about in history books, but something most people in my generation, at least in the western developed world have never had to experience.

Yet maybe hibernation is in order. I’m not saying the state of things is part of a grand mystical plan. I don’t think there is such a thing as a master plan. But if chaos means disorder and confusion, I don’t think we are well-qualified to say that the universe is ruled by chaos.

A healthy human body functions well to the naked eye, but at the cellular level cells are constantly fighting off harmful elements in what probably would resemble war. At that level it would seem chaotic, but at the corporal level, it would seem orderly. If we look at the cellular war, even there we could also say it is orderly because we can assign meaning to it, saying it is an obvious case of healthy, protective cells versus disease-causing bacteria, and of course it is there to keep our bodies healthy.

Our lives seem planned out, but our plans can be easily disrupted and we sometimes see no meaning or reason to it. Humans hate uncertainty, and we assign meaning to help us cope, but perhaps we are already following a certain order that we just cannot get a perspective of. In a way, maybe we are the cellular elements of our planet bodies. Perhaps our universe itself is a similar to a cell in a larger body of sorts we cannot even fathom.

The point is, I don’t think there is any answer to the question, but none of these means this question shouldn’t be asked or pondered. The question is there and it’s worth investigating. These types of questions can lead one down paths that are more significant than any concrete answer.

None of this is to trivialize tragedies or inspire naval-gazing when acting is appropriate: Doing what you can to stay healthy and helping keep others healthy. And such questions and their responses are rarely helpful, not to mention particularly unwelcome, when one is looking for practical advice. Nevertheless, we are also a species that looks for meaning as well as practical answers.

So my answer to her would be, I don’t think the universe is chaotic. I think it is spontaneous, but I do think there is an order or intelligence behind that spontaneity, the way you may not know which direction precisely a leaf will float through the sky, but it still float in the only way it could at that particular instant. Spontaneous, yet simultaneously with an order to it. Maybe you could reverse-investigate how the leaf floated by predicting wind patterns or heat coming off the pavement, but do so thoroughly would take you down an endless path that would still branch out with the same types of questions. However that intelligence is interpreted, be it religious, mystical, scientific, is also another way of the human mind trying to put meaning to something.

Whatever life ultimately is, it is beyond meaning, however. It is beyond labels. Maybe that is something we could take away from this period in history. Just because we can’t find a meaning or a reason to uncertainty, inconvenience, or even tragedy, it doesn’t necessarily mean that anything went wrong.