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Jerold Skolnik’s We’re All Crazy: Get Used to It! says that it’s important to start hearing yourself think, which is an important step to keeping order amid chaos.
According to several worldviews, life is merely the confluence of two forces, which are always locked in an endless struggle: order and chaos. While there has been a surge of advocacy for sometimes letting your life grow chaotic, keeping some semblance of order is still important.
These two concepts, order, and chaos, should always be in a comfortable balance. A life that is too orderly makes life rigid and bleak, but a life that is too chaotic is a life that makes it hard to start hearing yourself think.
Finding the time to relax and start hearing yourself think is quite essential. This idea is best described in We’re All Crazy: Get Used to It! by Jerold Skolnik, who explores the reality that bubbles inside everyone’s head: That order coexists alongside chaos, and everyone must acknowledge that fact for life to become more bearable and more satisfying.
While there have been many think pieces about the necessity of adding a bit of chaos into life, the number that talks about order has seen some decline. Of course, it is important to talk about why chaos is critical to living a successful and fulfilling life–but it is also important to talk about order.
Aside from Hearing Yourself Think
While the ability to start hearing yourself think is very important, there are also other benefits to maintaining an orderly life amid the chaos of the world around you. Here they are:
- Stress reduction. If you persist in chaos all the time, that tendency actually leads to ingrained disorganization, disunity, and an inability to appreciate the compact tidiness of some things. Disorderly people have trouble with making messes and staying still to focus and get things done. Anything that deals with patterns and procedures becomes challenging. If you are someone who tempers themselves, though, you are able to create a more orderly environment, giving you a better sense of control over some parts of your life, thereby reducing your stress greatly.
- Increased productivity. If you don’t take the time to understand things and instead dive right in, chances are you’ll only be slowing yourself down trying to get the hang of things if you exclusively go through firsthand experiences. While experiencing things without filters is a very commendable trait, doing so exclusively is a massive blunder. By taking the time to be orderly, you start hearing yourself think, and you get a better grasp of how to do things, thus making you more productive with your work from the get-go instead of floundering at the beginning because you’re deliberately giving yourself a handicap.
- Mental wellness. While it has been shown that being spontaneous sometimes and simply living life as the wind takes you can be beneficial to your mental health, the opposite is also true. Keeping to a schedule, following a regimen, etc., can also do wonders for the mind. Of course, this benefit only occurs if done in moderation. This phenomenon is likely to be because providing some structure, however small, to one’s life gives a direct measure of control and alleviates the anxiety caused by uncertainty.
- Achievement focus. Although it sounds better and easier to be winging things, the reality is that it needs a whole heap of luck–and some people just don’t have the luck. So, what do you do? While going crazy can be a strategy, at times, keeping consistent and simply establishing a clear plan of execution and a system for incentivizing yourself can do wonders for your objectives.
- Satisfaction and Contentment. Taking the road less traveled might sound exciting and is bound to take you on an adventure, but more often than not, it will net you unsatisfactory results. This is because when your life is in order, you can easily proportion your time and effort accordingly. Otherwise, you are just gambling on things and hoping to get the best outcomes.
Keeping Life Orderly Amid Chaos
While there are obvious benefits to structure and order in life, no one is advocating that you try to get a handle on everything and strictly follow things to a tee. That idea is a terrible one. No life can be perfect.
Order and chaos struggle against each other every day, but only because no one has yet to find the perfect balance between them. The world shifts rapidly around you without your consideration, ignoring whatever plans you may have or what grand designs fate has in store for you, so it is very important to take life by the horns whenever possible and learn to enjoy the destination otherwise.