Midst Of Chaos Quotes

In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity

In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.

My dear, In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that… In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back. Truly yours, Albert Camus” I like this because only one part is usually quoted but the full quote has such symmetry.

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

She imagines him imagining her. This is her salvation. In spirit she walks the city, traces its labyrinths, its dingy mazes: each assignation, each rendezvous, each door and stair and bed. What he said, what she said, what they did, what they did then. Even the times they argued, fought, parted, agonized, rejoined. How they’d loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin?

Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.

He screamed for all he had lost...screamed for the half male he was...screamed for Jane...screamed for who his parents were and what he wished for his sister...screamed for what he had forced his best friend to do...He screamed, and screamed until there was no breath, no consciousness, no nothing. No past or present. Not even himself anymore. And in the midst of the chaos, in the strangest way, he became free.

Stories are made about girls like you. The wild ones, those rare faces that smile in the midst of chaos.

So, even in the midst of craziness and exhaustion and life-changing chaos, I was filled with peace and the sweet knowledge that I was walking the path my Goddess wanted me on. Not that that path was smooth and pothole free. But still, it was my path, and like me, it was bound to be unique.

If you remain calm in the midst of great chaos, it is the surest guarantee the it will eventually subside

God is love. Love is always present, surrounding us; guiding, growing, and teaching us. Even in the midst of total chaos, pain, and dysfunction, love is calling us to a higher experience and expression.

Life is a performance, I thought. Perthaps the word "illusion" would have meant more or less the same thing, but to me "performance" seemed closed to the truth. Standing there in the midst of the crowd that evening, I felt this realization swirl dizzily through my body in a dazzling splendor of light, if only for an instant. Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we've ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the people we love, but we alone support the weight of ourselves.

And so it was that in the midst of chaos and color and light, in the glorious rebirth of a magical world, there remained two small vessels dark and drained. And those vessels were the heart and the soul of a brokenhearted young mage, sobbing alone in the sand.

It was called love. The hardest thing in the world to find and keep, but the one thing that made the worst imaginable hell tolerable. More than hope, it was truly the light that guided the lost to safety and kept them sane in the midst of utter chaos.

The real heroes are those who rebuild their lives using adversity as a stepping stone to greatness in the midst of the chaos life has thrown at them.

Every so often, in the midst of chaos, you come across an amazing, inexplicable instance of civic responsibility. Maybe the last shred of faith people have is in their firemen.

If you remain calm in the midst of great chaos, it is the surest guarantee that it will eventually subside.

Order is the cipher by which Mind speaks to mind in the midst of chaos.

Ordinarily we are swept away by habitual momentum. We don't interrupt our patterns even slightly. With practice, however, we learn to stay with a broken heart, with a nameless fear, with the desire for revenge. Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears.

I hope you choose calm. Even when you're in the midst of chaos. When someone upends your world, and the rest of the world feels utterly upside down: be calm. Some people need you to be their safe haven.

Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos. From the beginning it was never anything but chaos: it was a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills. In the substrata, where the moon shone steady and opaque, it was smooth and fecundating; above it was a jangle and a discord. In everything I quickly saw the opposite, the contradiction, and between the real and the unreal the irony, the paradox. I was my own worst enemy. There was nothing I wished to do which I could just as well not do. Even as a child, when I lacked for nothing, I wanted to die: I wanted to surrender because I saw no sense in struggling. I felt that nothing would be proved, substantiated, added or subtracted by continuing an existence which I had not asked for. Everybody around me was a failure, or if not a failure, ridiculous. Especially the successful ones. The successful ones bored me to tears. I was sympathetic to a fault, but it was not sympathy that made me so. It was purely negative quality, a weakness which blossomed at the mere sight of human misery. I never helped anyone expecting that it would do me any good; I helped because I was helpless to do otherwise. To want to change the condition of affairs seemed futile to me; nothing would be altered, I was convinced, except by a change of heart, and who could change the hearts of men? Now and then a friend was converted: it was something to make me puke. I had no more need of God than He had of me, and if there were one, I often said to myself, I would meet Him calmly and spit in His face.

Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.

But at that moment, I finally realized peace wasn’t about avoiding things. It was about making the choice to live life with all its chaos around you, and in the midst of it all, having calm in your heart.

Peace is not the absence of chaos. It is the presence of tranquility and joy in the midst of chaos.

Be awake in every moment but be calm and live in serenity in the midst of chaos.

I content myself with smiling up at him and saying, “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.

I had thought peace was a place where there was no turbulence or fear. Where there were no highs and lows and where happiness was found in the calm at the center. But at that moment, I finally realized peace wasn’t about avoiding things. It was about making the choice to live life with all its chaos around you, and in the midst of it all, having calm in your heart.

It's interesting, isn't it, to watch this character attempting to reconstruct herself, quite literally, in the midst of this chaos?

safety and kept them sane in the midst of utter chaos.

At some magical instant you realize a deep Harmony with the universe. Enlightenment is that harmony.

Silence in the midst of chaos is an art that no man can understand!

So, even in the midst of craziness and exhaustion and a life-changing chaos,I was filled with peace and the sweet knowledge that I was walking the path my Goddess wanted me on.

peace wasn't about avoiding things. It was about making the choice to live life with all its chaos around you, and in the midst of it all, having calm in your heart.

I was searching for peace in the middle of chaos. I was searching for a love in the midst of hate.

The city was a paradox, though maybe it had always been one. You could have an excellent life here, even as everything disintegrated. The city at that moment was not a place that anyone would remember with nostalgia, except for the fact that in the midst of all this, if you played it right, your money could double, and you could buy a big apartment with triple-glazed windows that overlooked the chaos.

The organist was almost at the end of the anthem’s long introduction, and as the crescendo increases the cathedral began to glitter before my eyes until I felt as if every stone in the building was vibrating in anticipation of the sweeping sword of sound from the Choir. The note exploded in our midst, and at that moment I knew our creator had touched not only me but all of us, just as Harriet had touched that sculpture with a loving hand long ago, and in that touch I sensed the indestructible fidelity, the indescribable devotion and the inexhaustible energy of the creator as he shaped his creation, bringing life out of dead matter, wresting form continually from chaos. Nothing was ever lost, Harriet had said, and nothing was ever wasted because always, when the work was finally completed, every article of the created process, seen or unseen, kept or discarded, broken or mended – EVERYTHING was justified, glorified and redeemed.

You've blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It's as though I cannot even remember what I once desired. All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself-- and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified-- at least that's what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart. In a single gesture you've turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you've shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don't have it.

Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.

They say that nothing is certain but death and taxes, and I already screwed one of those up, so I better pay my taxes....

nothing is guaranteed in life and that our search for security at work is pointless.

Peace is not the absence of chaos or conflict, but rather finding yourself in the midst of that chaos and remaining calm in your heart.

Jesus was the ultimate embracer of chaos. He preached and taught and shepherded a flock, and in the midst of his tumultuous ministry, he accepted everyone.

You're my stars in an endless night sky, my sanity in a sea of madness, my chaos in the midst of normality.

Yet, in the midst of the chaos, I find peace, as if I’m standing in the eye of a hurricane. I just hate the calm before the storm.

Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears.

Creating happens in the midst of chaos.

True peace is when you can be happy in the midst of chaos.

That More Peaceful Person started with one calm reaction in the midst of chaos.        That

In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing… was struck into stability.

Prayer ushers in order out of chaos, pulls peace out of confusion and destruction, and brings joy in the midst of sorrow. It takes what Satan meant for evil and brings us good. Prayer—

I’m very much interested in choices, and what it is and who it is that enable us human beings to make the choices we make all though our lives. What choices lead to ethnic cleansing? What choices lead to healing? What choices lead to the destruction of the environment, the erosion of the Sabbath, suicide bombings, or teenagers shooting teachers? What choices encourage heroism in the midst of chaos?”6

Let us not deceive ourselves. We are in the midst of a great world change, and it is natural that simple souls, poor wandering spirits, see no way out of the chaos, seek relief in suicide, or think the world is coming to an end and join in the race after the golden calf and rush blindly into the whirlpool.

How contrary an animal is man, who most treasures what he refuses or abandons! The soldier who has chosen war for his profession in the midst of battle longs for peace, and in the security of peace hungers for the clash of sword and the chaos of the bloody field; the slave who sets himself against his unchosen servitude and by his industry purchases his freedom, then binds himself to a patron more cruel and demanding than his master was; the lover who abandons his mistress lives thereafter in his dream of her imagined perfection.

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Earth, stars, and the vastness of space; yesterday, today and tomorrow; and the endlessly increasing knowledge of the relation of forces, present an illimitable universe of numberless phenomena. Only in general outline can the universe be understood. In its infinite variety of expression, it wholly transcends the human mind... In the midst of this complexity man finds himself. As he progresses from childhood to manhood, and his slumbering faculties are awakened, he becomes more fully aware of the vastness of his universe and of the futility of hoping to understand it in detail. Nevertheless, conscious man cannot endure confusion. Out of the universal mystery he must draw at least the general, controlling laws that proclaim order in the apparent chaos; and especially is he driven, by his inborn and unalterable nature, to know if possible his own place in the system of existing things.

Have you ever noticed, those who are so beautiful it almost hurts, have some pretty terrible backgrounds. And when I say beautiful i don't mean looks, more so A essence that shines from them. Angelic humans they are, every chance to turn dark yet within them they find this unbreakable power that says no, it's always in the midst of chaos they find a calm and conquer on. I always look to those with big smiles but deep eyes and wonder where they've been or what they've seen. Strength isn't something we're born with, we humans acquire it along the way. And I am always ever so curious at what has broken them so deeply that they chose to finally rise. To finally love themselves a little deeper. Those kind of stories captivate me, surface connection doesn't even compare.

Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. To stay with that shakiness — to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge — that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic — this is the spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately catching ourselves, is the path of the warrior. We catch ourselves one zillion times as once again, whether we like it or not, we harden into resentment, bitterness, righteous indignation — harden in any way, even into a sense of relief, a sense of inspiration.

Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition. But its blind impulse is to demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral. It protests, it demands, it insists that the outrage be brought to an end, and that what has up to now been built upon shifting sands should henceforth be founded on rock. Its preoccupation is to transform. But to transform is to act, and to act will be, tomorrow, to kill, and it still does not know whether murder is legitimate. Rebellion engenders exactly the actions it is asked to legitimate. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that rebellion find its reasons within itself, since it cannot find them elsewhere. It must consent to examine itself in order to learn how to act.

The thing is, Jesus was the ultimate embracer of chaos. He preached and taught and shepherded a flock, and in the midst of his tumultuous ministry, he accepted everyone. Everyone was allowed to join in on the love. The widows, the prostitutes, the lepers, the orphans, people with great need, people who brought drama and stress into his life, and folks who weren’t always lovable or even kind. Furthermore, Jesus told us to love them too. He didn’t ask us kindly or say, “Hey guys, maybe you could . . .” No, he straight up called us to stand with the oppressed. Jesus looked at them and said, “Bring it on.” Jesus took in the messy, broken pieces and said, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5 WEB). Amid our chaos, fear, and frustration there is the reminder, “For everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven” (Eccl. 3:1 WEB, emphasis added).

Imagine the case of someone supervising an exceptional team of workers, all of them striving towards a collectively held goal; imagine them hardworking, brilliant, creative and unified. But the person supervising is also responsible for someone troubled, who is performing poorly, elsewhere. In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What happens?—and the psychological literature is clear on this point.64 Does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be redone by others. He still gets paid, however, just like his teammates. The hard workers who surround him start to feel betrayed. “Why am I breaking myself into pieces striving to finish this project,” each thinks, “when my new team member never breaks a sweat?” The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.65 Down is a lot easier than up.

In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that . . . In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. —Albert Camus

CLARITIES OF FAITH Not that there are no clarities in the life of faith. There are. Vast, soaring harmonies; deep, satisfying meanings; rich, textured experiences. But these clarities develop from within. They cannot be imposed from without. They cannot be hurried. It is not a matter of hurriedly arranging "dead things into a dead mosaic, but of living forces into a great equilibrium."' The clarities of faith are organic and personal, not mechanical and institutional. Faith invades the muddle; it does not eliminate it. Peace develops in the midst of chaos. Harmony is achieved slowly, quietly, unobtrusively-like the effects of salt and light. Such clarities result from a courageous commitment to God, not from controlling or being controlled by others. Such clarities come from adventuring deep into the mysteries of God's will and love, not by cautiously managing and moralizing in ways that minimize risk and guarantee self-importance. These clarities can only be experienced in acts of faith and only recognized with the eyes of faith. Jeremiah's life was brilliantly supplied with such clarities, but they were always surrounded by hopeless disarray. Sometimes devout and sometimes despairing, Jeremiah doubted himself and God. But these internal agonies never seemed to have interfered with his vocation and his commitment. He argued with God but he did not abandon him. He was clear

I am leaving this tower and returning home. When I speak with family, and comments are always the same, 'Won't you be glad to get back to the real world?' This is my question after two weeks of time, only two weeks, spent with prairie dogs, 'What is real?' What is real? These prairie dogs and the lives they live and have adapted to in grassland communities over time, deep time? What is real? A gravel pit adjacent to one of the last remaining protected prairie dog colonies in the world? A corral where cowboys in an honest day's work saddle up horses with prairie dogs under hoof for visitors to ride in Bryce Canyon National Park? What is real? Two planes slamming into the World Trade Center and the wake of fear that has never stopped in this endless war of terror? What is real? Forgiveness or revenge and the mounting deaths of thousands of human beings as America wages war in Afghanistan and Iraq? What is real? Steve's recurrence of lymphoma? A closet full of shoes? Making love? Making money? Making right with the world with the smallest of unseen gestures? How do we wish to live And with whom? What is real to me are these prairie dogs facing the sun each morning and evening in the midst of man-made chaos. What is real to me are the consequences of cruelty. What is real to me are the concentric circles of compassion and its capacity to bring about change. What is real to me is the power of our awareness when we are focused on something beyond ourselves. It is a shaft of light shining in a dark corner. Our ability to shift our perceptions and seek creative alternatives to the conundrums of modernity is in direct proportion to our empathy. Can we imagine, witness, and ultimately feel the suffering of another.

In the midst of the chaos all around us, thank God for certain certainties!

Sensuality is the arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

To be awake at work is to engage each circumstance now, on its own vivid, fluid, and uncertain terms.

Don't blame—seek to understand.

The reality that everything is constantly changing provokes and tickles our attention because we never really know what’s going to happen next. We are awake at work precisely because everything is in question. Everything we are, everything we do, everything we want and desire, is basically in question each and every moment. This powerful and sharp reality demands that we wake up.

I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Dealing as we are with the very first experiment in proletarian dictatorship in world history (and one taking place at that under the hardest conceivable conditions, in the midst of the world-wide conflagration and chaos of the inlperialist mass slaughter, caught in the coils of the nlost reactionary military power in Europe, and accompanied by the completest failure on the part of the international working class), it would be a crazy idea to think that every last thing done or left undone in an experiment with the dictatorship of the proletariat under such abnormal conditions represented the very pinnacle of perfection.

But my parents understood that the world that they made within the walls of our house was what constituted home. So I grew up in spaces framed by art and color, filled with candlelight, marked by beauty. I grew up within a rhythm of time made sacred by family devotions in the morning and long conversations in the evening. I grew up with the sense of our daily life as a feast and delight; a soup-and-bread dinner by the fire, Celtic music lilting in the shadows, and the laughter of my siblings gave me a sense of the blessedness of love, of God's life made tangible in the food and touch and air of our home. It was a fight for my parents, I know. Every day was a battle to bring order to mess, peace to stressful situations, beauty to the chaos wrought by four young children. But that's the reality of incarnation as it invades a fallen world....What my parents-bless them-knew...is that to make a home right in the midst of the fallen world is to craft out a space of human flesh and existence in which eternity rises up in time, in which the kingdom comes, in which we may taste and see the goodness of God.

In nature, we find so may things. At the water's edge, atop a mountain, or in the middle of a park, I watch my children flourish in who they are. With all the distractions, toys, and walls out of the way, the essence of who they are just shines. When I remember to pay attention, I see it radiating so strongly that I can't help but be brought right into it myself. My children are experts on breathing, on living; they know how to do it. And the open air? Why, that's breath itself. When I find myself in the midst of unsettling chaos-full of more commitments and expectations that we can really handle-I need to look no further than my little ones for the answer to what I've forgotten: Stop. Breathe. Listen. Then we head straight to the beach, or right to the woods, and play until we find ourselves restored.

Dealing as we are with the very first experiment in proletarian dictatorship in world history (and one taking place at that under the hardest conceivable conditions, in the midst of the world-wide conflagration and chaos of the imperialist mass slaughter, caught in the coils of the most reactionary military power in Europe, and accompanied by the completest failure on the part of the international working class), it would be a crazy idea to think that every last thing done or left undone in an experiment with the dictatorship of the proletariat under such abnormal conditions represented the very pinnacle of perfection.

God didn’t give us His Word to use like a weapon or some kind of Hallmark card we can pass across the fence and keep some distance. It is a weapon, but one designed for use against our enemy, not against our sisters. It is meant for encouragement, not for pat answers in the midst of real pain. Just because something is true doesn’t mean you must voice that truth in all circumstances.

How wonderful is the certainty that each human life is not adrift in the midst of hopeless chaos, in a world ruled by pure chance or endlessly recurring cycles! The Creator can say to each one of us: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you” (Jer 1:5). We were conceived in the heart of God, and for this reason “each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary”.[39]

However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, which is not a closed system. It takes place amid great chaos and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order. Even a crisis, such as the periodic large asteroids that have crashed into the Earth, although increasing chaos temporarily, end up increasing—deepening—the

I wondered if we would have to choose music for his funeral or would we get to celebrate his high school graduation, his wedding, or even his next birthday." "I needed to focus on the daily victories without peering too far ahead to a potential dismal future for my beautiful boy." "God didn’t do this to us, but I do know He was using it for His glory." "Yes, there has been loss, but right behind it come gifts we would never have expected amid such trials: peace in the midst of chaos, joy within sorrow, and even a path of light surrounded by darkness." "I was not happy, but still, I had a great deal of joy." "When I focus on all He has given me, it’s difficult to see what I don’t have." "As uncomfortable as I often am through this journey, I welcome the chance to honor God through it." "I am so thankful God meets us where we are, then walks us the rest of the way." "While I wholeheartedly believed God would put the pieces back together, I also knew He might not put them together the same way they were before.

However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, which is not a closed system. It takes place amid great chaos and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order. Even a crisis, such as the periodic large asteroids that have crashed into the Earth, although increasing chaos temporarily, end up increasing—deepening—the order created by biological evolution.

Work is a mess” encourages us to first recognize that we can never have a completely neat relationship with our livelihood. Treating work’s messiness as if it were a mistake or liability only creates further unnecessary distress and resentment. By developing the attitude that work is a mess, we can learn to relax and be curious about the surprises and interruptions. By engaging the messiness of work directly—appreciating both the advantages and disadvantages—we become fully equipped to engage such events in all their variations.

...even though [my psychiatrist] understood mor than anyone how much I felt I was losing--in energy, vivacity, and originality--by taking medication, he never was seduced into losing sight of the overall perspective of how costly, damaging, and life threatening my illness was. He was at ease with ambiguity, had a comfort with complexity, and was able to be decisive in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. He treated me with respect, a decisive professionalism, wit, and an unshakable belief in my ability to get well, compete, and make a difference. Although I went to him to be treated for an illness, he taught me, by example, for my own patients, the total beholdenness of brain to mind and mind to brain. My temperament, moods, and illness clearly, and deeply, affected the relationships I had with others in the fabric of my work. But my moods were themselves powerfully shaped by the same relationships and work. The challenge was learning to understand the complexity of this mutual beholdenness and in learning to distinguish the roles of lithium, will, and insight in getting well and leading a meaningful life. It was the task and gift of psychotherapy.

On one side hung a very large oil-painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted. But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. - It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. - It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. - It's a blasted heath. - It's a Hyperborean winter scene. - It's the breaking- up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great Leviathan himself?

Everyone knows that only crazy people go to the island.   Arrested for a crime she didn't commit, Iris soon discovers that she already has a long criminal record she never knew about. When her world comes crashing down, she makes the ultimate choice and invokes her right to be sent to the island. There, she quickly discovers the horrors of a land where anyone can do anything they want, free of all rules and laws. She also meets Asher, a mysterious girl with a dark past and a crazy plan to establish her own town in the midst of the island's chaos. First, though, they both have to face a deadly group

Hitler remains undeniably the creation of his time, a creature of German imagination rather than, strictly speaking, of social and economic forces. He was never regarded in the first instance as the prospective agent of social and economic recovery—that was a post facto interpretation—but rather as a symbol of revolt and counteraffirmation by the dispossessed, the frustrated, the humiliated, the unemployed, the resentful, the angry. Hitler stood for protest. He was a mental construct in the midst of defeat and failure, of inflation and depression, of domestic political chaos and international humiliation. ... The ultimate kitsch artist, he filled the abyss with symbols of beauty. The victim he turned into the hero, hell into heaven, death into transfiguration.

Seith Mann: The thing about that scene [where the girl student slices the other girl's face] that really struck me, was Dukie and the fan. After this girl does this horrific thing, Dukie is reaching out with this fan in this sweet way. It was profound to me, seeing Dukie and the way he goes in the story. ... Seeing someone in the midst of all that chaos, for him to zero in on this girl and try to extend this gesture of kindness, of sweetness that can't really be articulated, was poetic. Even in the midst of all this madness, there's this sweet soul trying to touch somebody else and knowing the rest of the reason and how he gets lost on his way, to a certain extent, is why I think that season is so powerful. Just having an inherently good heart does not help you when you're in certain circumstances. That's tragic. (228)

[Charlie is dying:] After what seemed a long while, but hadn’t been, Marsh gave Paulette’s hand a warm and caring squeeze. “They’re here for him,” she said. But their heavenly visitors didn’t take him right away. They had to make room for the chaos of modern medical urgencies. To get out of the way of well-trained professionals who had dedicated their lives to holding back Heaven. Choppers are just as noisy and turbulent as we imagine them to be. One tore in over the hills and shattered every bit of peace Charlie otherwise could have lost himself into. In an instant the Med-Evac team was all over him. In the midst of that blatant orchestrated chaos Paulette fought to find her peace, and to hold him inside it. “Hang on, buddy,” techs kept telling him. “Don’t go leaving us now. You just hang in there.” But they didn’t understand, Paulette thought. It was his time. The chopper made a horrible racket carrying him off. Marsh, Paulette, and Ailana held their peace as its winds whipped their world into a froth. Harve’s face twisted with something that might conceivably have been rage. Then, all of a sudden, the birds sang, as though someone had given them a cue. “So that’s what it’s like,” Marsha said, very softly. “The afterlife. “My God, it’s so beautiful.

Complex systems are more spontaneous, more disorderly, more alive than that. At the same time, however, their peculiar dynamism is also a far cry from the weirdly unpredictable gyrations known as chaos. In the past two decades, chaos theory has shaken science to its foundations with the realization that very simple dynamical rules can give rise to extraordinarily intricate behavior; witness the endlessly detailed beauty of fractals, or the foaming turbulence of a river. And yet chaos by itself doesn't explain the structure, the coherence, the self-organizing cohesiveness of complex systems. Instead, all these complex systems have somehow acquired the ability to bring order and chaos into a special kind of balance. This balance point—often called the edge of chaos—is were the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either. The edge of chaos is where life has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of life. The edge of chaos is where new ideas and innovative genotypes are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown. The edge of chaos is where centuries of slavery and segregation suddenly give way to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; where seventy years of Soviet communism suddenly give way to political turmoil and ferment; where eons of evolutionary stability suddenly give way to wholesale species transformation. The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive. Complexity, adaptation, upheavals at the edge of chaos—these common themes are so striking that a growing number of scientists are convinced that there is more here than just a series of nice analogies. The movement's nerve center is a think tank known as the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded in the mid-1980s and which was originally housed in a rented convent in the midst of

9:36a    ἰδὼν δὲ τούς ὄχλους ἐσπλαγχνίσθη πεϱὶ αὐτῶν seeing the crowds, his insides were moved with pity for them THE JEWS AND THE GREEKS could not succeed in making pity and compassion into a purely mental act. It sounds archaic, hardly short of embarrassing, to say that “Jesus saw the crowds and felt pity for them in his bowels.” But, in fact, any translation that omits compassion’s element of viscerality (for σπλάγχνα, the root of the verb here, means “viscera”, “bowels”, “womb”) has already betrayed the depth of Jesus’ divine and human pity. We all know how the strongest emotions—whether sorrow, fear, joy, or desire—are all initially registered in the abdominal region, and this physiological reaction is one of the proofs of the authenticity of our emotions. The same teacher, herald, and healer who surpassed all others in these crafts finally reveals himself in utter silence and inactivity in his deepest nature: the Compassionate One who is affected by suffering more elementally than the sufferers he sees around him. If Mary’s womb was proclaimed blessed for having borne such a Child, we now see in the Son the Mother’s most precious quality: wide-wombed compassion. When we allow ourselves to be moved in this way, we are already hopelessly involved with the object of our pity: no possibility here of a distanced display of “charity” that refuses to become tainted by contact with the stench of human misery. Jesus looks at the crowds, then, and is viscerally moved. What power in the gaze of a Savior who pauses in the midst of his activity in order to take into himself the full, wounded reality about him! Jesus never protects himself against the claims of distress. He is not content with emanating the truth, joy, and healing power that are his: he must become a fellow sufferer. His loving gaze is like an open wound that filters out no sorrow. He has already done so much for them; but as long as he sees misery, nothing is enough; and so he wonders what else remains to be done. His contemplative sorrow becomes a stimulant to his creative imagination. He nestles all manner of plight within his person, and every human need becomes a churning in his inward parts. He interiorizes the chaos of the surrounding landscape, but, by entering him, it becomes contained, comprehended, embraced and saved.

And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost—climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!—for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs. Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;—than this furnace of music,—than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.

She stands in the centre, hands resting at her side. The light that shines from behind illuminates her figure and the wings that protrude from her back. She looks like an actual angel in the midst of chaos.

Meditation is not about being silent in solitude, it is a state of being silent in the midst of chaos.

It has always been in places of barrenness and isolation, where the heart of man begins to perceive that which, in the midst of his fast-paced life, he never could. Removed from the subtle pleasantries and distractions of his work-a-day world, his needs become simplified and yet more urgent; his ears become more sensitive and able to hear those gentle songs of heaven beginning to resonate in his soul. (pg. 59-60)

He said, "In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that in the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there's something stronger something better, pushing right back.

In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.

JFK was an asylum, a processing plant, a study in chaos—snaking lines, recorded announcements, furious passengers with their taped-up baggage, clerks fielding complaints in the midst of the madness. For the better part of an hour

It is easy, and all too common, to confuse watching for God as a passive acceptance of reality. But watching for God is an act of holy observation and subversive hope. In the midst of turmoil, chaos, and despair, it asks, "What is God doing, and what would God have us to do?

I spun back and saw Eli standing in the midst of the chaos, undisturbed. I rushed for him, grabbed his arm, and fell to my knees before him. “Save us!” I cried. Surely he could, with the power I had seen him use. He looked down at me lovingly and smiled. “Remember, Grace, you are the light!” he cried above the cacophony. “Just like me.

In the midst of chaos, the wise finds peace in the soul.

I wondered if we would have to choose music for his funeral or would we get to celebrate his high school graduation, his wedding, or even his next birthday I needed to focus on the daily victories without peering too far ahead to a potential dismal future for my beautiful boy. God didn’t do this to us, but I do know He was using it for His glory. Yes, there has been loss, but right behind it come gifts we would never have expected amid such trials: peace in the midst of chaos, joy within sorrow, and even a path of light surrounded by darkness. I was not happy, but still, I had a great deal of joy. When I focus on all He has given me, it’s difficult to see what I don’t have. As uncomfortable as I often am through this journey, I welcome the chance to honor God through it. I am so thankful God meets us where we are, then walks us the rest of the way. While I wholeheartedly believed God would put the pieces back together, I also knew He might not put them together the same way they were before.

They say chaos breeds misery. That those who smile in the midst of danger are past the point of salvation. But Belle was able to save the Beast from his curse, even after everything he did to her. So why should I believe that Kage is beyond redemption?

It reminds us that even in the midst of chaos and terror, there is the capacity for change.

As the great general says, “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.

Nature has taught me about fluid adaptability. About not only weathering storms, but using howling winds to spread seeds wide, torrential rains to nurture roots so they can grow deeper and stronger. Nature has taught me that a storm can be used to clear out branches that are dying, to let go of that which was keeping us from growing in new directions. These are lessons we need for organizing. As Octavia taught us, the only lasting truth is change. We will face social and political storms we could not even imagine. The question becomes not just how do we survive them, but how do we prepare so when we do suddenly find ourselves in the midst of an unexpected onslaught, we can capture the potential, the possibilities inherent in the chaos, and ride it like dawn skimming the horizon?

War gives you a sense of urgency about your life because there is so much death waiting for a chance. Maybe that's why it's possible to feel love in the midst of so much chaos.

Raging storm. The universe booms around me. She approaches. Frightfully, I stand. Yes. Stuck. Stuck in wonderment. Something so strong, so beautiful. Swirling around me. Will it absorb me? Maybe. Or might it pass by? It could. Rolling waves of rage and chaos. Cracks of thunder echo in my chest. I am in the storm now. How? Dancing in the wind. In her chaos. Can I become a part of her forever? I must be able to. This feeling, so wonderful. Maybe she will only pass me by. Leave me to fall from the sky? I hope not. This raging storm around me. So dangerous. So pure. Nothing but nature in her utter glory. Pushing me into motion. I spin in the midst of her, taking in the power. The walls of motion. Confusion surrounds me. Particles forcing together and cracking apart. I’m frightful again, the noise overpowering me. I hunch into a ball, scared of what will become of me. Still suspended in the air. But she silences. The sky clears around me. It must be the eye of the storm. The center of everything. The center of her. Yes. The sunshine blinds me. I raise my hand to shield my face. The silence a melody in my ear. Ah, finally soothed. How extraordinary this is, floating and rising. It overcomes me. This space. Joy? But then I feel the air shift. The power making my hair rise. And suddenly, I’m moving again. She moves along. This raging, rolling storm. The air sucking me up and down. Ripping me apart. Spinning. Spinning. Spinning. Fear consumes me again as the storm takes hold. Confusion. So much confusion. I cry, thinking I might die. But it’s over. I look at my hands. My feet. Back on the ground. She rolls away. Spinning beautifully onward. My, the power. But the question. Always the question. Do I love? Do I hate? Her beautiful, frightening glory. My dear raging storm. I drop the note into my lap. My hand comes up, covering my mouth in shock. I blink down at the note, trying to slow down my heart rate. Because Noah wrote this. He wrote all of this. And he wrote it about me. About how I make him feel. I think back to his project. How he told me it was about me. The eye of the storm. Chaos. Confusion. Awe.

Chaordic is a term that Hock used publicly for the first time in 1993: a newly minted modifier, forged from the words “chaos” and “order.” This was Hock’s after-the-fact attempt to name an honest and self-effacing approach to leadership—tested over decades—that attempted to invite order in the midst of chaos without imposing, prescribing, or predicting what that order should look like. Chaos theory is familiar to anyone who has seen the science fiction classic Jurassic Park.

Sometimes we find our frequency by holding on to a moral bottom line in the midst of chaos. Sometimes we find it by breaking the rules and running the red light to get home.

As long as we believe we can control life by trying, controlling, manipulating, putting pressure on life, we will live in constant exhaustion. We learn daily of our need for His Spirit to live through us because we are inadequate in ourselves. We learn to give up expectations that life will ever be perfect and to be content in the midst of the chaos.

I rested my cheek against Mute’s shoulder, my chin in his neck. He stiffened for a second then rested his head lightly against mine. My heart melted even in the midst of this chaos.

... the world always moves on despite the chaos and waste in its midst.

It was an ecological protest against air pollution, which in 1969 was at its worst, when acid rain burned our eyes to tears. I handed out bags of roofing nails to five friends and we all got to work. At first, we sprinkled them in the middle of the side streets when there was no traffic. I made sure that at least some of these nails stood upright, their wide heads on the cobblestones. We fanned out through the neighborhood, picking up new bags of nails that I had stashed at strategic locations. And finally, when it got dark, I threw handful after handful of nails across Canal Street in between traffic lights, and watched what happened. Cars ran over the nails, driving for only a few blocks before their tires went flat. In the Holland Tunnel, there were dozens of cars with flat tires, and dozens more backed up outside. Hundreds of disabled vehicles fanned out across SoHo and beyond. In the midst of the confusion, I approached a police officer and asked, “Excuse me, what is happening?” “A nut is nailing the streets,” said the cop. My performance piece was a brilliant success, I thought, falling into bed on the Bowery, aching with exhaustion. I was too angry, too selfish to think of the chaos and suffering I had caused, the lack of real benefit to anyone.

We Called Him Monsieur R. Dovid Aaron Neuman currently lives with his family in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He was interviewed in November, 2013, and shared the following remarkable story which happened during the war. “...In the midst of all this chaos and upheaval, my family was forced to split up.... I was sent to an orphanage in Marseilles. The orphanage housed some forty or maybe fifty children, many of them as young as three and four years old. Some of them knew that their parents had been killed; others didn’t know what became of them. Often, you would hear children crying, calling out for their parents who were not there to answer. As the days wore on, the situation grew more and more desperate, and food became more and more scarce. Many a day we went hungry. “And then, in the beginning of the summer of 1941, a man came to the rescue. We did not know his name; we just called him “Monsieur,” which is French for “Mister.” Every day, Monsieur would arrive with bags of bread—the long French baguettes—and tuna or sardines, sometimes potatoes as well. He would stay until every child had eaten. Some of the kids were so despondent that they didn’t want to eat. He used to put those children on his lap, tell them a story, sing to them, and feed them by hand. He made sure everyone was fed. With some of the kids, he’d sit next to them on the floor and cajole them to eat, even feeding them with a spoon, if need be. He was like a father to these sad little children. He knew every child by name, even though we didn’t know his. We loved him and looked forward to his coming. Monsieur came back day after day for several weeks. And I would say that many of the children who lived in the orphanage at that time owe their lives to him. If not for him, I, for one, wouldn’t be here. Eventually the war ended, and I was reunited with my family. We left Europe and began our lives anew. In 1957, I came to live in New York, and that’s when my uncle suggested that I meet the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Of course I agreed and scheduled a time for an audience with the Rebbe’s secretary. At the appointed date, I came to the Chabad Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway and sat down to wait. I read some Psalms and watched the parade of men and women from all walks of life who had come to see the Rebbe. Finally, I was told it was my turn, and I walked into the Rebbe’s office. He was smiling, and immediately greeted me: “Dos iz Dovidele!—It’s Dovidele!” I thought, “How does he know my name?” And then I nearly fainted. I was looking at Monsieur. The Rebbe was Monsieur! And he had recognized me before I had recognized him.

When a disaster like an earthquake strikes, in the midst of it we should cry out to the LORD, rebuke the storm, and ask for divine protection.

Historical influences contributing to the protean self can be traced back to the Enlightenment and even the Renaissance in the West, and to at least the Meiji Restoration of the nineteenth century in Japan. These influences include the dislocations of rapid historical change, the mass media revolution, and the threat of human extinction. All have undergone an extraordinary acceleration during the last half of the twentieth century, causing a radical breakdown of prior communities and sources of authority. At the same time, ways of reconstituting the self in the midst of radical uncertainty have also evolved. So much so that the protean self in our time has become a modus vivendi, a “mode of living.” This is especially true in our own country. The same historical forces can, however, produce an apparently opposite reaction: the closing off of the person and the constriction of self-process. It can take the form of widespread psychic numbing—diminished capacity or inclination to feel—and a general sense of stasis and meaninglessness. Or it can lead to an expression of totalism, of demand for absolute dogma and a monolithic self. A prominent form of totalism in our day is fundamentalism. Broadly understood, fundamentalism includes a literalized doctrine, religious or political, enclosed upon itself by the immutable words of the holy books. The doctrine is rendered both sacred in the name of a past of perfect harmony that never was, and central to a quest for collective revitalization. But the totalistic or fundamentalist response is a reaction to proteanism and to the fear of chaos. While proteanism is able to function in a world of uncertainty and ambiguity, fundamentalism wants to wipe out that world in favor of a claim to definitive truth and unalterable moral certainty.

this was a mission that came directly from the heart, and in the midst of the chaos I constantly kept repeating, in the form of a mantra, 'Everything will be okay. Everything will be okay.

In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” — Sun-Tzu, The Art of War

In the midst of chaos I draw closer to God. I've learned to trust in him no matter what. I'm so thankful for the lessons he has and will teach me. Even when I don't always get it the first time.

How can you find the truth in the midst of noise, of chaos! If you want people not to find the truth, create noise, create disorder, create complexities and create confusion! Because simplicity and tranquillity are the paths leading to the truth! Where there is commotion, there is no thinking!

In a world richly textured by new-meaning creation on such a scale as this, the question Who is right? seems a little quirky at best. The questions that seem more apropos to our time are, Who are the morally coherent, and how do they thrive in the midst of chaos and complexity?

Chaos in the midst of chaos isn't funny, but chaos in the midst of order is.

Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears. We can bring ourselves back to the spiritual path countless times every day simply by exercising our willingness to rest in the uncertainty of the present moment—over and over again.

When I look up from my book, the wind has gained its full voice. This storm is the mad child of Father Time and Mother Nature. Wailing away in no predictable rhythm, their monstrous offspring’s throwing a hackle-raising temper tantrum. Underscoring the hideous howl, I detect another, quieter sound, a pitiable, weak whimper which has been all but completely drowned out by the epic volume of the screaming wind. With slowly dawning terror, I realize this cowardly voice is my own; escaping through the narrow opening of my barely parted lips. Where’s my dad? Why is he taking so long? The weather ignores my whining questions and continues to whip itself into a raging convulsion. The windows rattle and the wind screams. But the sounds are no longer random. In the midst of the chaos, the howling begins to form an elongated word. Horrified, I recognize the stretched out syllables of my own name. “Aaaaannaaaaabelle.

In the midst of chaos lies the most seeked dream!

Foolish is the leader whom in the midst of organizational chaos believes since no one is approaching them with issues or concerns then everything must be doing fine. When your Soldiers cease communicating with you are 3ft into a 6ft hole.

My generation was born into a world where those with a heart as well as a brain couldn’t find any support. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no peace in the political sphere. We were born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquietude. Inebriated with objective formulas, with the mere methods of reason and science, the generations that preceded us did away with the foundations of the Christian faith, since their biblical criticism – progressing from textual to mythological criticism – reduced the gospels and the earlier scriptures of the Jews to a doubtful heap of myths, legends and mere literature, while their scientific criticism gradually revealed the mistakes and ingenuous notions of the gospels’ primitive ‘science’. At the same time, the spirit of free inquiry brought all metaphysical problems out into the open, and with them all the religious problems that had to do with metaphysics. Drunk with a hazy notion they called ‘positivism’, these generations criticized all morality and scrutinized all rules of life, and all that remained from the clash of doctrines was the certainty of none of them and the grief over there being no certainty. A society so undisciplined in its cultural foundations could obviously not help but be a victim, politically, of its own chaos, and so we woke up to a world eager for social innovations, a world that gleefully pursued a freedom it didn’t grasp and a progress it had never defined.

grounded in the midst of outer chaos, disorder, or ordinary, everyday bustle.

Kings speaks to everyone, every church, and every nation that might be going through turmoil. In the midst of turmoil, chaos, and confusion Jesus said the people were “weary and worn out, like sheep without a shepherd” (Matt 9:36). He came to save a rebellious people. And eventually the God over history will “bring everything together in the Messiah, both things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph 1:10).

An empty pageant; a stage play; flocks of sheep, herds of cattle; a bone flung among a pack of dogs; a crumb tossed into a pond of fish; ants, loaded and laboring; mice, scared and scampering; puppets, jerking on their strings; that is life. In the midst of it all you must take your stand, good-temperedly and without disdain, yet always aware that a man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions. —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Meditation creates harmony in the midst of chaos in my inner world and outer reality.

Who is he that shall control me? Why may not I act & speak & write & think with entire freedom? Who am I to the Universe, or the Universe, what is it to me? Who hath forged the chains of Right and Wrong, of Opinion and Custom? And must I wear them? Is Society my anointed King? Or is there any mightier community or any man or more than man, whose slave I am? I am solitary in the vast society of beings; I consort with no species; I indulge no sympathies. I see the world, human, brute & inanimate nature; I am in the midst of them, but not of them; I hear the song of the storm— the Winds & warring Elements sweep by me— but they mix not with my being. I see cities & nations & witness passions— the roar of their laughter— but I partake it not;— the yell of their grief— it touches no chord in me; their fellowships & fashions, lusts & virtues, the words & deeds they call glory & shame— I disclaim them all. I say to the Universe, Mighty one! thou art not my mother; Return to chaos, if thou wilt, I shall still exist. I live. If I owe my being, it is to a destiny greater than thine. Star by Star, world by world, system by system shall be crushed— but I shall live.

I survey the lux in flux and exploit it to stay happy," she said. I was bewildered. She sensed my hesitation to be drawn deeper and did exactly that. "You see, the trick to tide over misery is not to fight it; but, in sensing those little specks of happiness which providence embeds therein.The mere scale of it boosts enough to float over back to happiness." She was asking me to sense and extract happiness from sadness, cheer from misery, and order from chaos; while being in the midst of the latter. She was asking me to feel at ease with the uncertainty all around by using the certainty of my consciousness of it.

What really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering. Similarly, 'Man's problem is not suffering itself', but the lack of answer to the crying question 'why do I suffer?'. He certainly demonstrated a knack for reversing of perspectives, in describing how illness granted him freedom from abrupt changes, encouraged forgetting painful memories, and living at an easy relaxed pace. It saved him from bookishness and philology, forcing him to listen to his own voice and think. The period of sickness was a period of happiness, a return to himself and to creativity. Illness enabled him to appreciate health, which is often taken for granted. It was an energizing self-restorative power that motivated him to live and create. Sickness increased his enjoyment of small things; and most importantly, with the instinct for self-healing, it cured him of his discouragement and philosophy of pessimism. The sage sees everything, and especially things like pain, which cannot be changed, as advantageous, as a blessing. Nietzsche described personal providence in the midst of 'the beautiful chaos of existence', and how the playful chance sometimes leads to beautiful unexpected places, that we could not have found on our own. With a positive mindset, the sage believes that everything eventually works out for the best. Providence however, needs our help in interpreting and rearranging events in a way that would benefit us

In the midst of chaos and injustice and violence, Jesus displays gentle mercy for His enemy. The contrast is not only emotionally moving, but theologically significant and instructive.

In the midst of life, beyond all the noise of the chaos that abound all around, there is beauty so apparent we can touch,see, hear and sense it.

Without this intimate connection between man and the other natures about him neither he nor Middle-garth could exist. The myths tell us, if properly read, that man has created a habitable well-ordered world in the midst of chaos, and that to live and thrive he must for ever uphold his communion with every single soul and so constantly recreate the fixed order of the world. Primitive man never thought of pointing triumphantly to an eternal order of things; he had the sense of security, but only because he knew how the regularity of the world was brought about, and thus could say how it should be maintained.

He could feel the adrenaline surging through his system, but it didn’t blur his thinking. He’d been trained to channel it, manage it, control it, and let it create heightened focus in the midst of chaos. He began counting to fifty, a trick he’d learned to slow his breathing and steady his nerves. All stress is self-induced, he reminded himself. It’s in your mind. You don’t need it. Lay it down. Panic is contagious. But so is calm. Stay calm. Do your work. Slow is smooth. Smooth is smart. Smart is straight. Straight is deadly.

An Image of Disorder Consider the consequences of disorder, and you will be strengthened in choosing order in your life. The Torah gives us a direct teaching in this regard in the famous story of the Tower of Babel.16 The Hebrew word for sin, averah—like its English counterpart transgression—means “straying across a boundary.” The tower builders’ efforts to reach out to touch heaven were sinful because they transgressed the limits and constraints that are laid into the deep structure of the universe. Stretching for heaven, they failed to honor the distinction between the human and the divine. Since they flaunted order, their punishment was to suffer disorder, as represented by their inability to communicate with one another. Failure to honor the need for order brings on chaos. This cautionary tale applies to our lives, too. How much time, energy, emotion, and life is diverted into the channels that spring from disorder? Where are the Haggadot for the Seder? Where is my tallis? Who forgot to set the clock? Why didn’t you take the soup out of the freezer? Why would I buy milk if it wasn’t on the list? It’s in here somewhere. I almost got there. How many relationships are challenged or even destroyed by lack of attention to order? Without order, you are bound to be wasting something—whether time, resources, things themselves that get lost, relationships, and so on. Not wasting is a Jewish ethical principle.17 Any management consultant will tell you that you have to get organized if you want to be effective, but our concern goes far beyond that. Our concern is how living in chaos throws up impediments to being attentive to the divine will. And isn’t a life at the other end of the spectrum, which would be obsessively rigid, every bit as much an obstacle to spiritual living? Picture chaos, with stuff flying and piles of junk and cluttered thinking and a clanging ruckus: who could possibly hear the fragile voice of truth whispering in the midst of the tornado? And in contrast, but equally disabling, where order has been taken to the point of extreme inflexibility, even if you heard the divine will, would there be anything you could do to meld your own personal will to the will of God, so unbending would your ways have become?

In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity. Sun Tzu, The Art of War

That afternoon we rode into an armed camp. I glanced about at the orderly tents, the soldiers in battle tunics of green and gold mixing freely with those in the blue with the three white stars above the black coronet. As we rode into the camp, sending mud flying everywhere, people stopped what they were doing to watch. The closest ones bowed. I found this odd, for I hadn’t even been bowed to by our own warriors during our putative revolt. Attempting a Court curtsy from the back of a horse while clad in grubby, wet clothes and someone else’s cloak didn’t seem right, so I just smiled, and was glad when we came to a halt before a large tent. Stablehands ran to the bridles and led the horses to a picket as Nessaren and I walked into the tent. Inside was a kind of controlled pandemonium. Scribes and runners were everywhere that low tables and cushions weren’t. Atop the tables lay maps and piles of papers, plus a number of bags of coinage. In a corner was stacked a small but deadly arsenal of very fine swords. Seated in the midst of the chaos was Shevraeth, dressed in the green and gold of Remalna, with a commander’s plumed and coroneted helm on the table beside him. He appeared to be listening to five people, all of whom were talking at once. One by one they received from him quick orders, and they vanished in different directions. Then he saw us, and his face relaxed slightly. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized he was tense.

Stablehands ran to the bridles and led the horses to a picket as Nessaren and I walked into the tent. Inside was a kind of controlled pandemonium. Scribes and runners were everywhere that low tables and cushions weren’t. Atop the tables lay maps and piles of papers, plus a number of bags of coinage. In a corner was stacked a small but deadly arsenal of very fine swords. Seated in the midst of the chaos was Shevraeth, dressed in the green and gold of Remalna, with a commander’s plumed and coroneted helm on the table beside him. He appeared to be listening to five people, all of whom were talking at once. One by one they received from him quick orders, and they vanished in different directions. Then he saw us, and his face relaxed slightly. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized he was tense. Meanwhile the rest of his people had taken note of our arrival, and all were silent as he rose and came around the table to stand before us. “Twenty wagons, Lady Meliara?” he said, one brow lifting. I shrugged, fighting against acute embarrassment. “We’ve a wager going.” His neatly gloved hand indicated the others in the tent. “How many, do you think, would have been too many for you to take on single-handed?” “My thinking was this,” I said, trying to sound casual, though by then my face felt as red as a glowing Fire Stick. “Two of them could trounce me as easy as twenty wagons’ worth. The idea was to talk them out of trying. Luckily Nessaren and the rest of the wing arrived when they did, or I suspect I soon would have been part of the road.” Shevraeth’s mouth was perfectly controlled, but his eyes gleamed with repressed laughter as he said, “That won’t do, my lady. I am very much afraid if you’re going to continue to attempt heroic measures you will have to make suitably heroic statements afterward--” “If there is an afterward,” I muttered, and someone in the avidly watching group choked on a laugh. “--such as are written in the finest of our histories.” “Huh,” I said. “I guess I’ll just have to memorize a few proper heroic bombasts, rhymed in three places, for next time. And I’ll also remember to take a scribe to get it all down right.” He laughed--they all did. They laughed much harder than the weak joke warranted, and I realized that events had not been so easy here. I unclasped his cloak and handed it over. “I’m sorry about the hem,” I said, feeling suddenly shy. “Got a bit muddy.” He slung the cloak over one arm and gestured to a waiting cushion. “Something hot to drink?” A young cadet came forward with a tray and steaming coffee. I busied myself choosing a cup, sitting down, and striving to reestablish within myself a semblance of normalcy. While I sipped at my coffee, one by one the staff finished their chores and vanished through the tent flaps, until at last Shevraeth and I were alone.

Never has a man proposed for himself, voluntarily or involuntarily, a goal more sublime, since this goal was beyond measure: undermine the superstitions placed between the creature and the Creator, give back God to man and man to God, reinstate the rational and saintly idea of divinity in the midst of this prevailing chaos of material and disfigured gods of idolatry. Never has a man accomplished in such a short time such an immense and long lasting revolution in the world.

Today we are a supportive and helpful colleague; tomorrow someone considers us problematic.

the midst of apparent chaos and destruction. There is always another story going on behind the story that we see. God is at work in every situation, no matter how grim.

is unpredictable and chaotic—and it is in this untidiness that the warrior general finds victory.

anything can and does happen at work, and we have no option but to be open as circumstances unfold.

In the midst of the chaos in my mind, that's the thought that calmed me.

In the midst of chaos and death, a new family had been forged. One that as chosen as opposed to an accident of biology—and for that reason, more abiding and enduring.

To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.

I wish you moments of peace in the midst of chaos, drops of solace onto your sorrows and showers of love upon the desert of solitude.

the threat of life, so palpable among us, is a threat that can and will be countered by the Creator who continues the work of governance, order, and sustenance. Creation faith is the summons and invitation to trust the Subject of these verbs, even in the face of day-to-day, palpable incursions of chaos. The testimony of Israel pushes toward a verdict that the One embedded in these doxological statements can be trusted in the midst of any chaos, even that of exile and finally that of death.

Every next level of your life will always demand a different version of you. At some point in your life, you have to give yourself permission to become your best version. You will begin to see things differently. Yo start spotting opportunities in the midst of chaos. Consistency is harder when no one is clapping for you. You must clap for yourself during those times, you should always be your biggest fan. Stop following the crowd and be in the business of following your purpose.

When you maintain a peaceful inner posture, even in the midst of chaos, you change your life.

Just because truths seem to change, it does not mean they are lies.

The fabrication of the story is where divergent truths emerge.

Choosing compassion will foster open-heartedness for your soul, whereas judgment will foster close-heartedness.

You have control over how you experience your past.

You are in charge of how you recall your memories.

Replace judgment with curiosity

Instead of judging one's character, consider their circumstances.

When we blame the circumstance, we continue to have respect for the person. When we judge their character, we lose respect for that person.

How you feel and how you respond is your responsibility.

You can be hurt and angry AND have a peaceful heart.

These experiences are transitory. It will not be like this forever.

What they say you are is not necessarily the truth of who you are.

How affirming it is when you can be a full person—shadows and all—and still be loved!

Judgment breeds disconnection and contempt; curiosity breeds connection and understanding.

The choice is yours in how tightly you choose to cling to your story and which thoughts you choose to have about the event.

Just as you give yourself grace, give your partner grace.

Honoring your truth creates the space in which a peaceful heart can emerge.

Despite your best efforts and intentions, you cannot control how others think of you or respond to you.

In isolation, we assume we are in it alone. In connection, we find support, commonality, and companionship.

Finally, being kind to ourselves invites us to relax. Not just to kick back and light up a cigar or have a cocktail, though this could be fine at the right place and time. Relax in the sense that we can drop the burden of maintaining our point of view. At times of pressure, we can find ourselves being defensive or rigid—maybe taking ourselves a bit too seriously. Maybe we have to hold our ground on changing a critical deadline or one of our project team members is throwing a tantrum and blaming us for a deskful of problems. Being kind to ourselves suggests that we can lay down the heavy burden of taking a stand. We can afford to lighten up and listen and adjust—to be with the situation even if it is sticky and unpleasant. Being kind to ourselves invites us to appreciate that whenever work—and life in general—does not go the way we want it to, we can pause, put our heavy bags down, give ourselves a “cup of tea,” and remember that we are not just doing a job but are being awake at work.

Typically, business treats groundlessness or uncertainty as a liability or inconvenience, a temporary mirage on our way to perfect and lasting control. It’s as if work perfectly executed would eliminate uncertainty, guaranteeing success with no surprises, no mistakes, no risks misjudged. To be awake at work is to take exactly the opposite viewpoint. Rather than being a liability to be eliminated, groundlessness is acknowledged as the foundation or essential nature of all that we experience—the basic and unavoidable fact of life.

This was where war happened, in someone’s backyard. Sometimes it was yours. Often, it was someone’s a world away. But it did happen. In this moment. In the next breath. Every day. Every day, someone lived in the midst of destruction and chaos. Every day, someone’s flower boxes filled with gunpowder’s haze, a child’s laughter turned to tears. There had been a day when someone watered those flowers in the evening’s peaceful quiet and the children caught fireflies in mason jars. And that day will come again, when the crickets and the bullets no longer have to compete for the night’s stage. But for now, all anyone could do was fight on the crickets’ behalf.

The reality is that there is no solution to work’s inherent chaos and messiness. Work by its very nature will always be uncertain. The good news is that work’s messiness and uncertainty need not be distressing. They may, in fact, be just what we are looking for.

When at work, Use established routines to pursue objectives, Use messiness and surprises to innovate and succeed.

God’s purpose for your life cannot manifest in the midst of chaos. You can’t reach the place you were destined to be if you’re constantly getting sidetracked. You cannot reach your life purpose when everything in your life is undisciplined, distracted, and disordered.

Never has a man proposed for himself, voluntarily or involuntarily, a goal more sublime, since this goal was beyond measure: undermine the superstitions placed between the creature and the Creator, give back God to man and man to God reinstate the rational and saintly idea of divinity in the midst of this prevailing chaos of material and disfigured gods of idolatry. Never has a man accomplished in such a short time such an immense and long lasting revolution in the world. - Alphonse de Lamartine

The believer who doesn’t live in the confidence of God’s sovereignty will lack God’s peace and be left to the chaos of a troubled heart. But our confident trust in the Lord will allow us to thank Him in the midst of trials because we have God’s peace on duty to protect our hearts.

Anyway, in the interim since I turned writer—a good thirty years—I have hobnobbed with all varieties of man, from the highest to the lowest. I have know intimately saints and seers as well as those whom we disdainfully refer to as "the dregs of humanity." I don't know to which group I am more indebted. But I do know this—if we were suddenly faced with an overwhelming calamity, if I had to choose just one man with whom I would share the rest of my life in the midst of chaos and destruction, I would pick that unknown Mexican peon whom my friend Doner brought one day to clear the weeds in our garden. I no longer remember his name, for he was truly without name.

Three burdens dominated the thinking of the original philosophers: first, a quest for “monarchy”; second, a quest for unity in the midst of diversity; and third, a quest for cosmos over chaos. Though these quests may be distinguished at one level, at a different level all three involve the search for a metaphysical answer to the physical world.

If you are going to be calm in the midst of chaos, there’s something you must stop doing. When life gets difficult, when it feels as though you are being squeezed by the pressures all around you, you must refuse to panic. Jesus was not telling His disciples they were not

circumstances don’t determine your state of mind, for that power rests with you. When you maintain a peaceful inner posture, even in the midst of chaos, you change your life.

I thought my character was the most fun to play, but he was also exhausting. I developed a way of coping with the high energy it took to play Mike Seaver. All the times I had shut down in the car on the way to and from auditions taught me how I could go into a quiet space in the midst of chaos. During short moments between takes or rehearsals, I sat in my chair, closed my eyes and zoned out. For a while people thought I was depressed and asked my parents about it, until they learned it was my way of recharging my Energizers.

getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path.

Three months before Cadel’s eleventh birthday, his French teacher left the classroom, briefly, to answer an urgent phone call. When she returned, she found the entire class in an uproar with everyone fighting and shouting - except Cadel. He satin the midst of this chaos, quietly finishing the exercise she had set for all of them.

the most common insight I have noticed in people who are in the midst of change is that it does not feel good and it is uncomfortable. If you remember one thing about change, remember that it causes the “self” and the body to go into complete chaos, because the self no longer has any feelings to relate to in order to define itself. If we stop having the same thoughts, feelings, or reactions, we stop making the same chemicals, which sends the body into a state of homeostatic imbalance.

In the midst of chaos, tea serves as a soothing oasis, a chance to take a deep breath and regroup.

But when we mix our impatience with mindfulness, we don’t forget that being who we are where we are is utterly and perfectly sufficient.

because being calm in the midst of chaos is a sign of true power

There really were rabbits everywhere. They’d whoosh and bound past you in the blink of an eye, sometimes so fast that all you’d hear was the rapid thump thump on the ground before they were gone. They were as quick as the wind, and the only thing you really ever saw was their shadows as they skittered by. What impression did this give to us? Did it suggest the land was alive, vital and strong? Did it convey a sense of chaos, confusion and clamour? No, quite the opposite in fact, for the land seemed ever so silent. Indeed, I don’t know what other animal could’ve been as quiet as those wild rabbits. Although the wilderness was generally quiet, it took the appearance of the rabbits before you would become acutely aware of how quiet it really was. It was a sereneness that seemed more illusory than anything else - a type of nothingness, nothing but the wind and the grass, a rippling expanse that gifted a sense of kindness, the drifting clouds, thoughts dim and hazy. The instant the rabbits appeared, all of this nature awoke, the horizon suddenly shrank, and the air grew taut, ever so slightly. My heart followed suit, and so did my ears. My throat was empty, and all I could do was utter a gentle ah. That sound, let loose, became the most solid, most compact thing in the entire world. My body felt heavy, overwhelmingly so, and I was unable to move. But the rabbits bounded in front of me, racing back and forth, their gracefulness blending into the calmness of the land. Then another appeared, hopped up on a largish stone and stood motionless, its eyes directed towards me, peering into me. The silence of the scene increased tenfold. One more rabbit jumped into view and the quiet deepened yet again. They came, more and more, and as they did, all sound was evacuated from the world, transforming it into a clear, limpid pool of silence. I turned my head, a movement that now seemed magnified amid the stillness. My ah lingered in the air, not yet absorbed into the sweeping quiet of the landscape. It seemed to persist, perched just above the calm. I’d been enraptured by nature countless times before, caught in its web, unable to free myself, but I’ve never been able to put this into words. Nothing but my ah…I simply stood there in the midst of all of that confusion and clamour, the chaos swirling about, avid and avaricious. The silence encircled me, stealing the words from my throat. Countless times I’d praised the earth, the wild, but still I could not put into words that there was really no connection between us.

The first of these basic principles is keeping inwardly calm and clear even in the midst of violent chaos; the second is not forgetting about the possibility of disorder in times of order.

If you take nothing else from this book, I hope you remember this: Success is possible, even in the midst of a complex and occasionally chaotic life. You do not need to wait for some less-hectic future time to become the person you want to be. With a different perspective, and a focus on doing what you can, you can be that person now.

Serenity may be the most precious gift we receive because it allows us to know that our lives are in the care of a Power greater than ourselves and therefore, even in the midst of chaos, there is hope. (82)

How much chaos there is in this creation! Hundreds of stars and comets are hurtling at lightning speed through the sky. How many living beings, beyond even our ability to imagine, are going back and forth between life and death in the midst of great pain and misery. And all the while, the diverse life histories of all living beings are being written. On the surface of the ocean are rows of tremendously high waves, engaged in battle, as it were, day and night. Beneath the surface, an oyster is manufacturing a pearl out of a small particle of sand. It doesn't keep track of the tremendous turbulence that is going on above. This is not mere poetry. We have seen this "terrible truth" with open eyes. That is why I ask you to disregard the external world and enter deeply within yourself. At the end of the war, a new human society will arise. Prepare yourself to serve that new "god of society". Day and night remember the words [of Swamiji]: "The only God I believe in is the sum total of individual souls." That God is none other than Ramakrishna-Sarada- Vivekananda.