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Coping with Chaos

This post was written by DoctorJay on December 18, 2009
Posted Under: Success, goal achievement

“Life is suffering,” said the Buddha. He might as well added, “Life is chaotic.”

According to the second law of thermodynamics things left to themselves will go from a more ordered state to a less ordered state. That is to say it takes energy to counter the natural tendency for the world to become more messy all the time.

That’s where “Coping with Chaos” comes into its own.

I wish to give an example of how chaos happens and how to deal with it. When I’m working with computers I tend to multitask and work with multiple machines. At this moment I’m working on three laptops. One is the main one that I’m using at this moment to write this with and then I start tasks which take time on the other laptops.

I was doing this and one of my laptops turned itself off in the middle of a task. That’s chaos.

My immediate reaction was to be a bit peeved. That does not reduce the chaos and in fact makes life more difficult. Relaxing and accepting the increase of chaos allows one to be flexible and choose the right action (in this case waiting for the computer to cool down before restarting it).

Being flexible allows one to select the right action in any given situation.

In cybernetics there is a law called the law of requisite variety which states: “The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate.” Now to put that in English – the more flexible you are (the more different behaviors you are able to display) the more you can control the behavior of the group.

So for example a mother is in a supermarket with a toddler and the toddler wants a toy, the toddler will be flexible and try everything (smiling, being good, crying, having a temper tantrum) and chances are that will eventually leave the store with the toy. If the mother had as many different behaviors possible then she would have controlled the situation.

So in order to cope with the natural chaos and messiness of life we need to be flexible – accept whatever is very gracefully – and take appropriate action calmly.