Order in Chaos

One year my cubicle ended up right next to my manager’s office. Sharp and capable yet motherly in nature, every day her office was like an emergency room. She had an endless line of people coming in with complaints and problems concerning not just work, but personal life as well. Every now and then, and especially after a crazy day I would poke my head in to check on her. She would say that sometimes it got so chaotic it made her head spin and she couldn’t see straight. She laughed when I presented her this card in an 8” x 11” frame. She put it up on her wall as a reminder until the day she was promoted to another department a few years later.

“When it rains it pours” is a saying probably because that’s how life is sometimes; everything hits at once. While most days we try to balance and juggle our lives, when chaos hits, everything gets swept up in its vortex. Instead of trying to hold everything together or chasing after one thing or another, get safely back to your foundation. Once there, quiet your heart and mind. Then like still water, the path forward will be reflected clearly.

Speaking about how the Masters acted, the Chinese philosopher (and said founder of Daoism) Laozi asked, “…Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?”

As Jackie Chan echos in The Karate Kid with Jaden Smith, “Being still and doing nothing are two very different things.” In our fast-paced society where we’ve been taught “time is money” and people feel waiting is a waste of time, the virtues of patience and stillness have been forgotten. Sometimes, simply by waiting the answers will come to us.

Food for thought: Is it smarter, safer, and faster to charge blindly through the night to get through the forest just to keep moving, or wait till the morning when it is light and you can see your destination? Waiting includes staying safe, conserving energy, and planning ahead.

What is the state of your water?