(Listen to me read this on my award-winning podcast.)
Last week’s podcast and post were a meditation on finding joy in chaos. I encouraged you to embrace it as a source of creativity and, instead of feeling shame about your life's state, step into the power you have to order it by making small changes.
This week, I’ve got one of the “Mini-Joys,” a practical application of this larger topic. After all the rumination of the full-length posts, I like to make us a shorter, bite-sized, practical takeaway. In other words, try this at home.
When standing in front of something like that drawer in the kitchen or the calendar for the month of March—anything you find chaotic—try these three (extraordinarily gentle and non-judgmental) tips to aid in ordering the chaos.
Name the chaos for what it is… without judgment
Take my kitchen problem. I’ve made it a point this year, every weekend or so, to take on one tiny chaotic corner and bring order, and a few weeks ago, it was the two cabinets to the right of my stove. One held the spices. They were in there planning an ambush against anyone who opened that door, overflowing and falling out; one of them even shattered on my countertop. The other cabinet beside it held all the tea paraphernalia: honey, matcha, chocolate milk powder for Eva, etc. It also accumulated the kids' vitamins, the elderberry syrup, and a highly random selection of medicinal things. These are frequently used cabinets and high-traffic areas in the kitchen, and they just weren’t working. Have you named the chaos? Sometimes, simply doing that can feel triggering or make you feel bad about yourself, especially when it feels like it’s your fault. Yet, when you take away the stigma that chaos might have in your brain and remember that it is just the raw material of life, an invitation to a creative solution, you realize it isn’t a moral failing that your cabinets are overflowing. You can see chaos for what it is: an offer to accept, an invitation to act.
Ask: How does this need to work for me?
We need the spices by the stove. We need the tea stuff by the electric kettle. These instincts were right. But there were plenty of things we weren’t using that crowd the stuff we grabbed a lot. And so, when you are faced with a chaotic situation, admit it’s chaotic and then ask: How does this need to function? How does this need to work for me to feel how I want to feel? I wanted to feel like things we needed were right there, so I took all the less often-used spices and put them in the hard-to-reach cabinet above the microwave. I pulled all the tea stuff out and made an even bigger mess so I could really be the arbiter of how things need to work. After you name the chaos for what it is, name how it needs to work and what you mean when you say “order.” It will be different for every person, and it will only be sustainable if we name how we need it to work in this season, at this moment, based on what matters for each of us.
Bring joyful order and call it good
Now, here’s the thing. If the order you are executing over the chaos is not bringing you joy, if you can’t call it good (or good enough), then no wonder the systems you’ve created in the past weren’t sustainable. When I took the time to organize those cabinets, I felt so much joy in my choices. I put the matcha and the decaf chai in the front because I love them. I realized we had saffron left, and we should make paella soon. I was delighted with the objects I chose to have in my kitchen. Sure, there are many things in there that I feel neutral about (that don’t particularly spark joy), but I keep them because we may need them one day. The order in which I chose to put those things reflects my joy for what I love. The purpose of the ordering is to feel more joy, to call it good.
Photo by Paul Esch-Laurent on Unsplash And, here is what artists know so well about chaos: art and life are messy. The chaos gives us a chance to delight in the unexpected and to see that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When we stop judging the chaos and instead invite it in to learn from it, we accept the offers it brings and watch order become a catalyst, first and foremost, for joy.
What helps you order the chaos? I’d love to chat in the comments!
