Why Suffer Chaos?

It’s a fact that shared experiences bond people. And if you’ve seen Band of Brothers or know of anyone who's survived WWII combat, you also know it’s a fact that horrible, shared experiences are particularly good at bonding people. The good side of chaos?

Most of you wouldn’t willingly choose to experience horrible chaos in your life, though perhaps some of you are negligently inviting it in. Why? If you knew the answer to that, you wouldn’t be negligent, and you wouldn’t need to read this. (I guess another title for this post could have been, “Why Bad Things Happen?”)

If you don’t know the meaning of life yet, please allow me to share it with you; it’s actually pretty simple: The meaning of life is to grow in love. If you already love people, hooray, you’re off to a good start. If you love those people selfishly and unconditionally, even better. Now take that love, perfect it, and apply it to everyone, selfishly and unconditionally, and you’ll win the game of life. The number of steps from how much you currently love to how much you can love decides the amount of growth you’ll need to win.

I’ll admit I am nowhere near the finish line, but knowing the rules of the game makes it infinitely easier to play. It's a hard truth that in the game of life, growth either occurs in reaction to self-driven effort or life-driven chaos. In other words, if you are not continually pushing yourself to grow in love on your own, you could say you are in need of some chaos to push you forward.

You might infer from all this that I am saying that chaos will definitively stop happening to you and around you when you become more loving. I am not saying that; I can’t say that because I just don’t know what life has in store for you personally. What I am saying, what I do know, is that the more you fully grasp the meaning and rules of the game of life, the less you will experience the bad side of chaos, and the more you will experience the lessons and opportunities to grow in love. Consider this: When chaos does hit, who would you want next to you? Someone who is freaking-out, fearful, crying, and fully experiencing all the horror and drama of the chaos, or someone who is calm, collected, peaceful, loving and soothing the situation in which life has placed you? Who would you be? Who would you want to be?

On the chance that continually pushing yourself to grow in love does result in less chaos, please do your part. In the meantime, to pseudo-quote Louis C.K., “Of course it’s horrible when bad things happen. Earthquakes, plane crashes, wars. Of course those things are horrible. Of course they are. But maybe, just maybe, they need to happen to bond us to create more love in the world.”