Source https://zenhabits.net/chaotic/
By Leo Babauta
It is a wonderful thing to have order to our lives, to simplify and have routines and systems that make things peaceful, organized, and calm.
Unfortunately, life likes to throw chaos and disorganization our way.
Things get disrupted, people interrupt, email requests pour in, our neatness gets messy, schedules get thrown into disarray, things get busy and hectic and complicated.
How can we stay sane in the middle of all this chaos? How can we take the chaos and busy-ness and messiness, and use them as opportunities to get good at handling it all?
The answer is with practice. And the practice is a method of letting go and re-centering in the middle of chaos.
The Method: Letting Go & Re-Centering
When chaos and messiness come our way, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not inherently stressful and anxiety-inducing. It’s just that our minds don’t usually like these things. We want order and simplicity.
So the problem isn’t the external situation. It’s our internal ideals. We want order and simplicity, not to be interrupted, not to be overwhelmed. The ideal of orderliness is causing our frustration, stress, anxiety, not other people, not a chaotic situation.
The ideal of orderliness causes our difficulties. And we created the ideal. Therefore, we are causing our own difficulties.
The g…