The Chaos of Preparation...

I can’t tell you how many times my life has fallen apart.  Big ways.  Small ways.  Sometimes on the daily, things just end, curtail, change in a way that everything that comes after that pivotal moment, is forever different.

It never feels good.  All of my changes in life feel like I am totally on the brink.  On the edge of some awfulness from which I shall never recover...

For me, I have come to accept that all major change comes with an attendant and exceptional level of chaos.  And that chaos often comes in three tidal waves that upend me and not so slowly threaten to drown me...

It has taken a long time but I have come to see the chaos as preparation.

The chaos functions to make space for the change that is about to enter.  There is no space in my life for the new thing, job, person, event to land.  So good old chaos comes to clear out that which has out lived its useful purpose in my world.

And despite it always being like this...I am never prepared for it.  Even when I see it coming, it is like I have some sort of ingrained blind spot to the effect chaos shall produce...

Even when I see it coming, I underestimate the level of dysfunction and dysregulation it is going to cause...

It never appears to me as preparation...it always just feels like I am doing everything wrong, I can’t find happiness if it was attached to me, and that I shall forever be on the outside looking in.

But, when the chaos settles, the landscape is most often beautiful.  I see paths cleared that I never saw before.  The dust of upheaval settles and I can see clearly vistas that just prior were blind to me.

I don’t know if I shall ever be able to find peace in the chaos, to know that chaos is just the harbinger of peace.  That chaos and peace have this bizarre marriage that cycles through and around and then back again.  It is unavoidable.  The only thing optional is how much and for how long I suffer in the confusion of the chaos.

There isn’t one chaotic period I have survived that didn’t prepare me for the new whatever that arrives in chaos’ wake.  Not one.  Pretty good odds!

On the other side of the craziness, the change, the upheaval, I am always and forever renewed, reclaimed and reincarnated into some better version of me.  Always.

I am not sure if I shall ever be able to see the chaos as the preparation.  But I am getting closer...my levels of acceptance and peace within the raging storm chaos always uses is better.  I am able to relax and allow more than I ever have.  Change doesn’t break me nearly as badly as it used to...

I see the preparation of chaos’s arrival in my life.  And I am learning, ever so slowly, to acknowledge nothing has left my life, been taken from me that I have not learned vital lessons from.  Are there things that I would like back that have been removed...only a few.  This process has deepened my level of acceptance about all the things that happen to us in this life that we do not see coming, or that we fear most.  Everything shall come to pass...myself included.

So today as I swim through the various chaoses of my life, I feel deeply that I am being prepared...

Again, still...