Chaos Theory
I love chaos. I mean, fractals? Mandelbrot diagrams? I’m all over that action. The ineffable, unfathomable wonder that is simply there, all around us. We didn’t have to make it. We don’t have to understand it (which is lucky really, because, dude, chaos means that a coastline is, like whoa, infinite and finite at the same time.)
A friend today said that she wondered if what Daniel found in nature was perfect order. Where the seed falls, there grows the tree. Alive, growing, dying or decaying, all that seeming randomness of the woods is in fact, at root, a perfect order. Order that needs no organizing, no rules, no calendars or schedules or geometry. We then went to parent-teacher conferences and heard that, among many other war-stories, Daniel had thrown an almighty tantrum about the fact that grateful wasn’t spelled “greatful” which he thought it should be. He once was so furious that it wasn’t Tuesday that I finally invited him to stop yelling at me about it and go yell at the universe.
He did.
Chaos, baby. We got it going on.
One layer after another – chaos, pattern, chaos, pattern – as far as we know, the root has always been pattern underlying the chaos. But then, we can’t find the beginning, so…
I was the one in my family who craved order (although I’ve grown out of some of it and might never have had as intense a craving as Daniel does right now), and my brother had an equally strong–or perhaps stronger–craving for chaos. I often felt like I was locked in place, holding my arms out taught, trying to keep the world from flying apart, while my brother was deliberately disrupting the tides and reorganizing continental drift.
Tell Daniel he is right that greatful would be much superior. But then again, I feel full of raspy grating more often than I feel full of greatness.
But then again again, grates are frameworks that hold things together, and for that we should be grateful. Or that’s my 2 cents. No–scrap that: it is gratis.
This made me laugh like crazy.