Friday, June 30, 2006

A day in chaos


I always feel that an average day in my life is a journey through chaos. And there are days when things happen like clockwork. So today I set out to figure what creates this flow of changes, what could change it.

Chaos theory describes something called "order in randomness", using that as a metaphor I can see a pattern emerging in my daily life. Eat, sleep and live are actions that I do everyday at more or less regular periods. Its the things that I do in-between, that seem to summarize a day as chaotic. And what goes on in between?, other than the physical needs of the body which are addressed at regular intervals, its the flow of thoughts in my mind which make up a typical day.

Interesting, so chaos and order are right there in my mind?. Maybe, Now is there order in chaos. Yes, I alternate between work, play and entertainment, but if we alternate between these activities at a very rapid pace, say every few seconds, then take a look at it over a time frame thats much larger, it appears chaotic, dont know which one I'm doing when and for how long.

The trick in finding order in chaos is to know that there are a limited number of things we do, and to see it from the level/distance which will make it look like a set of repeating activities in a day. From this perspective the duration is all that seems to be random and the tasks are just repeating. Hmm...If we can somehow fix the duration everything suddenly transforms into a rhythmic repeatation of well known tasks.

Now is'nt that what we call focus? working on a task long enough to meet some milestone.

What I'm trying to get to is that chaos is just another state of exactly the same set of thoughts and ideas. And all I have to do is use bigger timeslices for the same set of tasks to transform it into orderliness.

Crazy?, well thats what I am.. Cheers!