(You can hear me read this essay with music and sound design here.)
I was walking down the street once in Philadelphia, and suddenly, a colorful square in the middle of an otherwise brick building caught my attention. Wait, were those…LEGOs? I got as close as possible, reached up, and touched them. Sure enough, someone had taken the initiative to patch a large hole their AC window unit had left in the side of their apartment building with LEGO blocks. There was even a tiny toy window.
With a little googling, I learned that this trend, also known as Dispatchwork, was a community art project that’s been going on since 2007 that began with German artist Jan Vormann. Online, you can see a map of buildings across 40 nations, each with a patch of bright yellows and blues, reds and whites and yellows. Hundreds of individuals have joined around the globe, filling in the crevices, restoring facades, and mending cracks in their neighborhoods with toy blocks that make the chaotic, colorful, childlike creativity flow, and it is so beautiful.
Photo cred: Runa Anderson for Street Art News
As I write this, it’s about 49 degrees in February, a few days after a very big snow. In the creation story of my religious tradition, people translate the words that describe the raw material from which the world is created in a few different ways. I heard a new (to me) translation from the Hebrew word tohu wa-bohu recently—some call it the “formless void,” others call it “watery chaos.” That feels very on-brand for winter in Michigan, to be honest. The salt and brown slush, mud pools perched to become ice again; it’s like regular chaos, only wet.
I’ve been thinking a lot about chaos lately. A meme is going around this time of year about January being the free trial month of 2024. Asking: “Should we cancel the subscription?” At my house, between all the ears being infected and the strategically placed snow days, 2024 is a bucking bronco; just when we get into a rhythm, we keep getting thrown off. The watery chaos makes for a grouchy mama and bored children. The sunlight is short, the house messy, I do not feel particularly creative, and I find myself holding my breath at the state of the world, waiting for something to be different, lacking the energy or the willpower to attempt to make it so.
The hardest thing about rejecting the whole “new-year, new-you” January thing for me is that I do long to feel new. Don’t you? It is so tempting to fall into the trap of getting a gym membership, buying a planner, or starting a diet because you’re waste-deep in a life that just isn’t quite working in some ways. There have been points in my mine when it felt more painful to stay the same than it was to change. I’ve heard coaching clients say something similar. “I’m sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.” And so we pull not-so-gently at the loose threads of all that armor we are wearing with what some call “black trashbag energy,1”, which is less “new-year, new-you” and more Extreme Makeover Life Edition. “Is this where it hurts? Here? What about here?” Until the whole thing begins to fall away, and we stand there exposed. And, despite the cold, it’s a relief to let go, to change.
And yet, no matter what I let go of, it does not get to the bottom of the real issue. The real issue is that my life feels chaotic. There are toys everywhere. House projects are started and abandoned. My calendar, graciously (and suspiciously) empty one minute, is suddenly overflowing with drop-offs and pick-ups and grocery orders, and work trips the next. I love our life, yet sometimes it can feel like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Photo by Simi Iluyomade on Unsplash
The other day, during one of the snow days when I should have been working, I was doing an art project with my daughter. (Let’s be real: I was working on my computer at the table whilst my daughter was doing an art project on the kitchen counter.) If she were a cartoon, she’d have been surrounded by a cloud of glitter and construction paper, Elmer's glue, and washable paint. She was having fun and making an industrial-strength mess. Exhausted, thinking of how I was about to have to clean glitter out of the grout, I jumped in and tried to contain it.
“Mama,” she said, “art is messy.”
So I turned around to my computer, where I was writing about creativity and chaos, and realized it.
Chaos is where the art is. Chaos is the raw material of life. We can’t be creative without it.
My final word of the year for 2024, after “abundance” and “open-handed”, is a three-word motto, a command to myself, a new lens through which to see my life, schedule, art, house— order the chaos.
The chaos cannot be eradicated. I am realizing more and more that I am powerless to stop it. And thanks to my daughter, Eva, I realize that’s good news. Instead, I can work to see the hope in it and, just like the creation energy of Genesis, order it in whatever ways my very limited human hands can. Taking a cue from the Creator of the Universe, I, too, can call it good… or, at least, good enough.
I’ve spent so much time attempting to make my life less chaotic. Haven’t you? I want to feel prepared and more able to anticipate the needs of those around me, to stretch into the white space of free time. I want to be one of those people who always does the laundry on Saturdays or plans the meals for the entire week on Sundays, but I kept “failing.” I fail for many reasons, but mainly because this season of my life is chaotic, and instead of trying to change that, I’m working on being ok with this reality.
I don’t see a weekend commitment coming. I failed to remember to buy milk. I’m too tired to tidy up or load the dishwasher. We plan the meals, and no one wants to eat chicken tonight, including me. We like being spontaneous and living with the flexibility to pivot. Life without a little chaos would be boring and, frankly, would never work for us.
So, ordering the chaos means seeing the disorganized circus that is my life sometimes as an invitation to accept instead of a problem to solve. When we judge the mess, we can miss the art that is asking to be born in it. We forget to look around and notice the people in the clouds of glitter with us; we’re so busy judging ourselves and—let's be honest—others that we fail to say yes to the opportunity that chaos provides: to be together, to creative-problem-solve, to love one another and our life, to be surprised, to feel joy.
So, what does ordering the chaos look like in real-time?
First of all, it sometimes means making a bigger mess. It’s pulling out everything in that little cabinet in the kitchen that’s causing stress, not to purge necessarily, but to bring order. It’s buying ingredients to make a meal without knowing exactly when or how we will eat it. Mostly, it’s about not feeling bad when the pesky pandemonium of life with two children under six and a husband with a busy job appears. It’s remembering that living and loving is messy, and when there’s a little chaos, it’s creative joy knocking at your door. It’s remembering to answer the door.
Using LEGOs to mend a crumbling facade is one of my favorite examples of ordering the chaos. The joy I felt that day walking in Philadelphia and seeing them on the side of that decrepit building—it made the chaotic world just a little more beautiful, and it brought me joy.
What if we met the challenges we face with the most unexpected and playful answer, not following our first instincts to tear down the structure and crash diet and start over, but mend what we can, when we can, with what we have?
Ordering chaos requires us to remember that we are not problems to be solved but people to be loved.
What chaos are you sitting in right now, friend?
Life is unpredictable (understatement of the year), and we do not need guilt thrown on top of our already heavy load. I hope you, every now and then, will choose to play free jazz, create an action painting, or try the silliest improv game you can think of. I hope you feel the incredibly messy, raw material of creative inspiration. I hope you will laugh at your life, especially when it is at its most chaotic. As an artist, don’t forget what my daughter reminded me—art is messy. Life is messy. So why not make it pretty? Put the glitter in the grout and grab the LEGOs; we’ve got some chaos to order.
In Celtic spirituality, the Spirit is often depicted as a Wild Greylag Goose.
Unlike the calm, gentle, elegant dove of the Bible, the goose is known for its honking call, unpredictable nature, and aggression, especially when defending its territory. This Celtic spiritual tradition epitomizes the Holy Goose’s disruptive and transformational disposition: powerful, wild, and untamed.
Inside the chaotic moments of life, when it feels like one long wild goose chase, what if you could trust that the goose you’re chasing (or that’s chasing you?) is wise and loving beyond your understanding?
When we create, we are connected to something larger than ourselves. This means that we can believe that there is more at play than we can see in a given moment, we can open our hands and make room for surprise and delight, and we can stop resisting the chaos and start seeing the Spirit of love and creative power in it, fiercely defending us with a loud, chaotic honk.
Don’t let your desire for order, certainty, and predictability steal your joy. The chaos and the unexpected detours are ripe with creative possibility, an invitation for you to keep saying yes despite the mess. As an artist, you have the power to order the chaos, too; you can set the boundaries between the sea and the sky like the Creator of the Universe did.
Whatever ways we order the chaos this year, I pray we never begrudge the wild goose chase, that we may all pause long enough to look up and see the joy as it flies by.
Kendra Adachi, The Lazy Genius, taught me this term.
Fantastic article! I have been in a constant state of trying to fix the chaos in my life. I’m going to give more thought to accepting.