Are You Addicted To Chaos?
A How And Why Of Simplicity

By BOB LANCER

PART 1

Is chaos keeping you from a sane, inner life? We give ourselves too much to do, too many factors or coordinates to deal with, and then we feel overwhelmed. With feelings of overwhelm come unhappiness, impatience, irritability, and an inability to connect deeply, compassionately and harmoniously with those we love. Overloading yourself with complexity, with too much to deal with, generates a life of conflicts.

Before deciding to add one more thing to your daily schedule, one more responsibility to your life, consider your need for inner peace.  You can only handle so much well before you begin making choices that are too costly because you lack sufficient attention to give to the matter at hand.  You end up resenting people, feeling like a victim, dragging yourself through the day in a state of heavy fatigue all because you have overlooked your need for a sufficient degree of simplicity each day.

A certain degree of simplicity is a necessity for a healthy, happy life made up of rich relationships and meaningful accomplishments.  You need to be able to see clearly in order to get your priorities straight, and clear-seeing becomes impossible when you are rushing to get things done, struggling to control and organize too many factors. Unless you are doing what is most important and operating in an organized, unstrained manner, you are generating costly chaos and painful conflicts in your life.

A sign that you need to deal with less is getting into accidents; misplacing things; feeling much stress, overwhelm, anxiety or depression; getting into arguments; losing your temper; over-reacting emotionally to minor delays or oppositions; discovering misunderstandings occurring repeatedly in your communications.  When your life begins to feel too busy, too jam-packed with things to do, too demanding, you probably resent others for not helping you more; but the real problem is that you are giving yourself too much to do.  The solution is obviously to delegate more where you can, and to let go of what is less important before it costs you what is more important.  For instance, you may need to spend less time driving your children to activities so you can spend more time hanging out together in calm, close bonding.  Too much activity drives us too hard, causes us to drive others too hard, drives everyone crazy.

While the solution is obvious, it may not be easy for you to incorporate.  You may actually find that you are at least somewhat addicted to the chaos and drama that overloading yourself produces.  It has you running on adrenaline, and that can give you a buzz similar to amphetamines or cocaine. Rushing around on a rush of stimulation may seem like fun for a while, but inevitably it leads to a crash.  This may mean literally that you crash your car because you are paying too little attention to where you are.  It may mean that you crash into some other costly consequence of poor choices based on the superficial judgment of hasty reasoning.

Your inner self sends you signals, in the form of feelings, that tell you to stop doing so much so that you can simply be more conscious, more present, more completely where you are.  If you respond to that signal by doing more, by taking on more, it may be due to your misguided belief that your inner emptiness needs more busy, dizzy, nervous intensity to fill the void.  All that may do is numb you to your true feelings, which is the same thing as blinding you to your true self, to your deeper concerns, to what you really do care about the most. Then, your life spins farther off course, into more destructive, dramatic, chaotic scenarios.

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