When you are swimming in the ocean, there's a certain point at which you begin to feel the pull of the tide on your entire body. It's a dangerous current, one that sweeps you up and in with little to no warning, one that often proves to be deadly.
If you grew up on or near water as a kid, you were likely told when a current was too strong to go swimming in a particular area. In many cases, you avoided the water all together, or at the very least stayed near to the shore.
However, sometimes the current crept up on you. Maybe it wasn't strong enough to cause alarm, or maybe you were told and overestimated your swimming skills: either way, you found yourself slowly drawn in to a force bigger and stronger than you, suddenly fighting to make your way back in one piece.
When I think about the ocean, about the tide and the push and pull of all that encompasses life, I think of chaos. There is nothing that I know of that attracts and traps people more than this force, this unseen, sweeping power that leaves nothing behind.
If you were ask someone if they like chaos, the likely answer would be no. But as a therapist, I have seen enough to know that more often than not, the real answer is yes.
We. love. chaos.
We do. We love to chase after things that are passionate and unknown and sometimes even volatile, we love the ups and the downs and the feeling of being alive.
We may even love to suffer, because our suffering adds value, adds meaning to whatever it is that is sitting before us. Our suffering tells us a story about who we believe ourselves to be, what we think can or should be offered to us at any given moment.
We gravitate towards chaos because in some way, it feels good to feel bad.
There's so many reasons for this, far too many to process and go into detail here. But at the heart of it all I think is this:
We are afraid of love.
When we sense it, when we feel it is being given to us freely, we lose it. We do not like the feeling of not being in control, and love that is a gift is just that: an offering that leaves us vulnerable if we choose to accept it.
So, we run to chaos to protect us from ourselves, because at least there we are in control of our own destruction.
You see, love requires us to let go, to fall deep, to trust another person. It asks us a question, one that we are often not prepared to answer or ready to address:
Are you worthy?
Our heart hears and quietly turns away. With our eyes tightly shut we run as far as we can into whatever feeling will drown out the request that love is begging us to take, anything to stop us from hearing that we are going the wrong way.
Love beckons to us, time and time again, and we give it a different excuse every time.
Not yet, we say.
Let me get it together.
Hide the mess.
Make myself more deserving.
But love, love see our mess and comes to us arms wide, beckoning us to seek shelter underneath a canopy of grace. It offers us stability and protection and consistency and we, well.
We are just not ready for it.
I'm not sure I completely understand my own draw towards chaos. Maybe it's the pain, maybe its the certainty. I do know, however, that I have entered its current one too many times. That I have listened to its siren call as truth rather than as an alarm warning me of storms up ahead.
Chaos calls to us because it is as familiar as our own name, it is a mirror for what we feel at the deepest core of who we are.
Are we love?
Or are we chaos?
Are we worthy?
Or will we let the tide pull us under to everything we fear,
but ultimately believe to be true?
We must choose.
Sink.
Or swim.
As for me, I'm fighting like hell to reach the shore.
Chaos continues to call my name.
But love is calling louder.
No comments:
Post a Comment