When life gets chaotic
Inertia — Nº179
Recently, helping out at my family gathering revealed a level of peace I didn’t know I would find when things get a bit hectic.
It was a beautiful turnout for the tenth anniversary of my grandma’s passing. Following two days of preparation, the barbecue refused to stop spluttering for a while before getting started, followed by a vast amount to cook and people shouting my name from more than one direction. Wrong day to wear light colours. Trying to catch up with family I hadn’t seen in over two years intertwined with my smallest siblings grabbing my hands and trying to pull me to another room for something they had discovered five minutes ago. Sorting food orders out merged with hearing several questions that went in one ear and out the other. I was shattered by the end, but it was all so much fun.
Life’s a whirlwind, isn’t it? You reach adulthood and understand it more, that some days you’re simply caught in a storm, rain pelting your face, and the wind whipping past your eyes. Everything’s a blur, spinning, speeding, yet you feel stuck and in slow motion.
But here’s the thing: chaos isn’t your enemy. It’s life’s way of shaking things up, of testing your mettle. It’s the world asking, “Hey, you awake?”
When it’s all coming at you, and you feel the weight above you like an Olympic barbell in an overhead press, what do you do?
You breathe.
You find peace. You plant your feet. You look chaos in the eye and say, “I see you”.
It’s not easy, of course. Some situations will demand so much from you, especially a calm core in the eye of a storm. But once you know—really know—that you can weather any tempest, something amazing happens. You stop fighting the chaos. You start dancing with it.
The best athletes—and many others—can thrive on this dance, even from an early age. I see it in my sisters. They’d chase the storm, hungry for its electric energy. Calm waters bore some people; they relish the crash of waves and feel love during the dance with the unknown. They dress up amidst the dizzy, messy, and unpredictable.
There’s power in that. In embracing the chaos, in letting it wash over you and filter impurities out. In those whirlwinds, clarity can strike like lightning. If you’ve ever competed in anything, you can feel it there the most. It’s where you can turn major turbulance into a smooth tailwind current no one else can take advantage of—or, just not as well as you.
If you stand in chaos long enough, you learn how it calls for you. So next time chaos comes to your door, let it in, let it remake you. Because in the end, it’s not about ducking, avoiding, or fully controlling chaos; it’s about being at peace, undisturbed, while in the middle of it.