Order and Chaos

Having spent the better part of this last year as a stay-at-home parent raising my son I've learned a lot about control and chaos. Things come and go like seasons changing; blurry, erratic, and unpredictable. In any given week a day can be as different from the last and as different from each other as you can imagine. Then a week comes where I could set my watch by his schedule. I spent a lot of time and energy in the beginning agonizing over discovering his new schedule when there wasn't really a schedule to find. But when I had found it (read: thought I'd found it) I felt triumphant. I had won. I had accomplished something! Except, it would unravel the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that.

There's nothing wrong with accomplishment, but I've noticed in my own life that blind devotion to a goal tends to create in me an unpleasant, unsatisfied, and deeply frustrated existence. I miss all of the important experiences and relationships and learning that takes place on the getting from here to there. In short, I'm not present to the present. I lose my grasp on life, and perhaps more importantly, I lose touch with the people around me. After a month of chasing some sort of order to the chaos I decided, instead, to learn how to live in the chaos of everyday life with a baby. That didn't mean things miraculously calmed down, or some sort of magical peace laid itself like a puke-stained blanket over our lives, it just meant that I was beginning to let go of the illusion of control I was so desperately clinging. You don't find order in the midst of projectile vomit-soaked clothing whilst changing a diaper as your hand so carelessly lands in the pile of viscous poop you are trying unsuccessfully to clean up. [Important side note: Do not google image projectile vomit. It is not worth it. Trust me.] You find chaos there.

I've been asked a number of times what Taoism is, or what someone might read to learn about Taoism and I'll confess, I don't read a lot about Taoism. In fact, I actively try and avoid books about Taoism because, at it's heart, Taoism is about being. I realize that word has become loaded, but I'm using it in the most elementary sense. There is no trick to this stuff, no special chanting or meditation or prayer one can speak in a moment of desperation to invoke peace or tranquility. Attempting to suppress those moments of chaos is exactly what Taoism tells me NOT to do. Accepting them, learning from them, feeling deeply that utter lack of control and fear is the process. Being in it, is the point. Sometimes literally in the case of puke and poop. I act after I become aware of the present circumstances, feelings, and relationships that inhabit a given space. If reading is a helpful tool for you, I would suggest A Walk In The Woods, by Bill Bryson (an author that seems on my mind lately). Unorthodox, yes, but I've found that's where spirituality tends to live for me. Here he's describing his larger experience of hiking the Appalachian Trail:

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A Mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.  

Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It's quite wonderful, really.  

You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, "far removed from the seats of strife," as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge. 

There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It's where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter. 

It's a surprisingly accurate description of the aim of Taoist practice. The trick, of course, is learning how to live that in one's everyday life where the tranquility and boundlessness of the woods doesn't inhabit your every waking step. And yet, being a stay-at-home parent has given me a perspective similar to that boundless woods, though, perhaps lacking some of the tranquility. The difference, for me, has manifested in marveling at the incredible lack of predictability rather than wallowing in the incredible lack of predictability. I'm not always successful at the former because, damnit, sometimes I need to feel sorry for myself. I think it's a defense mechanism, or an evolutionary instinct that reminds me to step back and settle the fuck down. It would be helpful to hear that more often, "settle the fuck down". If someone would just like to email that phrase to me regularly, or PM me, or text, or post on my facebook wall, I'd be much obliged. I have precisely zero problems fabricating things to freak out about.

The kicker is that a lot of Taoist literature idealizes the state of being of a baby as a sort of pure state, a state in which they act without conforming to any cultural expectations. Babies excrete when and where they want. Babies can cry, for hours, without abate. Babies like naked. Babies yelp and screech and dance and move however they feel whenever they feel. What the Taoist literature overlooks in its zealotry for babies is that those things are usually done on top of someone else. A convenient oversight Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, convenient indeed. Or perhaps, that's the point, a little philosophical joke if you will. How cute.

All of that being said, there is something beautiful and energizing about all of this chaos. It's forced me to remember to pay attention to him, rather than try and control him, the ironic piece of which has resulted in a child who now wants to be on a schedule, like clockwork, and will completely fall apart when he's not. Because, ya know, life. We'll see how long it lasts. Perhaps this time I'll be better equipped to marvel rather than wallow. But more likely I'll be doing both at the same time. I know, I know, "settle the fuck down."