Walk through chaos
Daily writing promptIs a little chaos actually good for us?
I'm just going to invert that question a little and ask: Is a little order good for us? I'm doing this because the question "Is a little chaos good for us?" assumes that chaos can be pippetted into our lives in "little" quantities, that at all other times things are completely predictable. I learnt from navigating what is at most times a chaotic newsroom that a good life is less about learning how to exert control and more about responding to situations, whether or not we control them. Granted, the question "Is a little order good for us?" is equally susceptible to that argument, but I'd also like to use it to illustrate something cool, something I think has helped me work more efficiently, too. It's called a random walk. It's more of a concept than a walk you take — although you could try it in the real world and see how it goes. In a random walk, a person walks on a grid of square cells, like a chessboard. If the person is standing in one cell, they take the next step by tossing a coin. If it's heads, they take one step left; if it's tails they take one step right. So each step is random and the odds of you being able to correctly predict which way the person will move next is 50%. However, the few rules that a random walk does have to follow means that as the person takes thousands of steps over time, the walking pattern they follow will start to show some strong patterns. For example, after the person has taken N steps, their distance from the starting position will be around N1/2. Put another way, just a little order, consistently applied, can lead to predictable outcomes — including ones that we desire. I realise this metaphor is thin but I've found it to be a useful way to think about unpredictability. So much can go one way or the other and we try to take as much as we can in stride just as much as some small good habits can build up to something great.
