New Year New Chaos

Well, here it is all shiny and New Year, happy? Not so much at the moment but things change, that is something that I depend upon at stupid o’clock when I can no longer pretend to sleep.

I’m told that things are ‘for the best’ and that is ‘just how things are’ and yet… in my belief system things are what I make of them. Funnily enough it seems that the only thing I am making at the moment is a right bloody mess of it.

My love of Chaos has come back to haunt me, it resides in my brain, never quiet and on the surface less than totally helpful. Like all things that are interesting (?) it is what is going on beneath the surface that is the important part.

The dreams it throws up (in the minutes I do manage to collapse into sleep), like projectile vomit are vivid, colourful and yes there are references to carrots… I don’t know, it’s an unconscious thing – I’m sure Freud or Jung would have something or other to say about it but my favourite guy has to be Carlos Castaneda, he has such wonderful little homilies to be helping one out with ones daily debacles.

“It is important to do what you don't know how to do. It is important to see your skills as keeping you from learning what is deepest and most mysterious. If you know how to focus, unfocus. If your tendency is to make sense out of chaos, start chaos.”

Interesting thought for the day really, but also it has to do with unravelling. The things that we can do when we unravel things; like on Christmas night – there I was in my cousins house, cheeks almost as red as the wine I was quaffing back quite happily when her daughter came in with a necklace that she had managed to get in a fankle.
It was passed around about four different pairs of hands and was really getting more and more tangled, until finally it came to us.

It looked like an impossible job, but being the helpful souls that we are, the former partner in crime and I, got working on it together. What was helpful was having an idea of what it should look like and what its purpose was outside of the chaotic mess it had become.

It took a bit of manual dexterity and more than a little patience and perseverance but I knew it would not leave our hands until it was fixed and in its original state, and so it was.

So many things that we see in life as chaotic messes could be less so if we only took the time and the patience to see it as it is in its original form and return it to that – or the form we originally intended, a clear and unsullied picture of the outcome we aspire to.

Then again Carlos has another good one for those chaotic things that we get ourselves embroiled within…

"A path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself alone, one question. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't it is of no use."

I suppose it is time to get the moccasins on and start walking the New Year Path remembering all the time that
“Conclusions arrived at through reasoning have very little or no influence in altering the course of our lives”

Back to Chaos again!

Goals and aspirations at this time of year are uppermost in our minds. I had few and now I have one less… it is yet to be decided as to whether this path has heart.

So, the last words I will leave, not to Carlos this time but to Robert Frost…

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I…I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.”

May all your paths have heart and may you walk only far enough to know the difference and no farther, and may you find the one less travelled.

Happy New Year.