Order versus Chaos

We crave order. We need order. A place for everything, and everything in its place. But life isn't like that. Our lives are messy and chaotic, sometimes smooth, and sometimes hectic and spinning out of control. We tidy, we clean, we wash, and then its messy again. We rinse and repeat, our lives becoming like a washing machine, stuck on a heavy duty cycle that never ends.

Nature is naturally messy. There is no apparent order. Leaves, bark and sticks, strewn all over the place, with one plant here and then several over there. There is no order, no neat paths, no neat trimmed hedges, nothing in neat rows. Simply a mess. Yet when our lives are chaotic and messy, a walk in nature, calms and soothes us. What is it about such a messy place that can calm and heal our soul?

Perhaps teenagers have this all figured out. A teenagers bedroom is chaotic and untidy, strewn with clean clothes, dirty clothes, rotting apples, shoes, stuff, and more stuff. And yet teenagers cocoon themselves in that messiness, and emerge from that chaos, some years later, gorgeous, fully grown adults, a metamorphosis from teenager to adult. And for us, spending time in nature, we too undergo a metamorphosis from worry to calm, from anxiety to peace, from chaos to order.