Chaos: The law of unintended attraction
There you are sitting at your desk. It’s peaceful and you have a little time to read or catch up on your to-do list. Then all of a sudden there’s someone in front of you with several deliveries, the phone rings at the same time, and another person comes over with an emergency only you can handle; all this and you suddenly have the urge to go to the loo. That’s chaos. It only lasts ten minutes or so and then it is quiet again for a couple of hours before another chaotic quarter-hour arises. How and why does this happen?
People like to talk about the Law of Attraction: like attracts like. This incorporates such themes as Cosmic Ordering and positive thinking. Basically, you make the world around you. But now think about the opposite Law of Unintended Attraction and the chaos that it brings. You are at work or home, relaxing or doing your own work and a series of unrelated events converge at one time and one point centred around you. You have not caused it or wanted it, but you have unwittingly become a convergence point, an attractor, for several key moments in space and time.
Think about it. At the desk where you work, you may be by yourself or one of many in an office in an inconsequential job and/or building. A courier has journeyed across town from his depot at the mercy of any traffic before he reaches you. A staff member or guest in the building has chosen to call about a pressing issue and after several transfers of varying lengths of time; the call comes through to you as the courier arrives. Your manager decides (s)he needs your immediate attention now. Oh, and you’ve drunk too much coffee and need to visit the restroom, just as all the other events come together. What are the chances of all those seemingly random factors coming together at one random moment in your day?
In reality, there is no such thing as randomness. Even randomness has a pattern, no matter how long it takes to repeat. The events around you are not random, but a pattern that would be hard to discern in the few hours or days you are at work. It could take a lifetime or more of meticulous recording to make sense of the chaos that surrounds you. Every factor would have to be accounted for like weather, traffic, demographics, geography, biochemistry, online ordering habits, delivery schedules, mealtimes, among other things, but most importantly –that most ephemeral thing- human capriciousness.
Humans bring about their own Law of Unintended Attraction. It is not a wished-for experience and can be made worse by negative thinking. When unrelated events start to gravitate toward you, they can accumulate and increase the pressure upon you. You have two choices: explode under the extreme pressure or go with the flow. The first option is undesirable. It may be best to focus on each new concurrent influx of work in a positive manner until they become separate micro-events floating around you. This will dissipate any pressure, enabling you to handle each event in your own time.
In other words: don’t stress. The Law of Unintended Attraction does not last long, unless you are very unlucky or you are unknowingly making yourself the focus of such unwanted attention. Most macro-chaotic systems (e.g. climate, population, disease, traffic, etc,) crash spectacularly when their parameters reach the breaking point. But what happens to you at your desk or in life is a clash of micro-chaotic systems centred just on you. These are eddy currents of the macro-chaotic system; blips in the ordered world. We are all walking talking chaos systems and we take our chaos around with us everywhere. We butt up against other chaotic systems and with six billion such systems in the world, surviving in a vast natural chaotic system, there are bound to be moments in the continuum where your own personal chaos system is affected. And it is out of your control.
So, think about this. You are sitting at your desk. The morning rush is over and you have a few quiet minutes to yourself. Three hundred million years ago, a piece of rock began a slow journey through the cosmos and after several million gravitational nudges to its orbit slows down and lines up on an insignificant, small, blue planet. Your urge to visit the restroom arises after your morning coffee; just as your phone rings. You wonder whether to answer it or to tend to your urge. After a breathtaking plummet through the atmosphere at thousands of degrees and surviving as a blazing fragment of itself, the meteor crashes through the building and onto your desk. Were you there or not? Did that space rock have your name written on it three hundred million years ago? In all that time, all that space, the Law of Unintended Attraction will bring together the most unlikely sets of chaos systems.
The Law of Unintended Attraction is blind, affecting anything and everything as it slips through the depths of space and time, unimpeded. It weaves chaos systems together, from all walks of life, from near and far; some stay entangled and others drift apart. The chaos of life is not beautiful to behold, but it has a complex attractiveness, all the same. The Law of Unintended Attraction will drive you crazy as you ponder its reality and machinations, but you will not leave this life without being in its thrall.
