What Chaos and Crisis Teach Us

I have had enough chaos, crisis and tragedy in my life to write a book about it. That’s why I am currently trying to finish up three books; To See Or Not To See: The Art of Transcendent Living, The Middle East Crisis In My Backyard: How Communities Come Apart and How They Heal, based on the story at this link, and Hot Pants, Motorcycles and K Street. 

Each of these books and all of them are tales, somewhat in the form of memoir, that tell of chaos, crisis and tragedy in my life, as well as enormous successes in my life, born of crisis, chaos and tragedy; personal transformation, in other words, that has been the product of personal challenge. Additionally I am also trying my best to put excerpts from my first three books as posts on my Dark Side Warrior blog site as these books have been on hold for longer than I care to remember due to my losing my eyesight.

Pushing our way through obstacles is the sterner stuff we humans, particularly Americans are made of; challenge turned into opportunity. Or as Murat,  New Horizons Beloved community development mentor and my personal spiritual teacher, might say how we humans carry out the alchemy of our personhoods naturally, transmuting the lead within to the potential for the gold within.

I know this pathway of transformation well. In fact, periodically I feel inclined to remind readers that I am available for you as a guide for this treacherous terrain called personal (and collective) transformation. I know it well having chosen to traverse it for decades, if for no other reason than personal survival.

I don’t like crisis or chaos, least of all do I like tragedy. You probably don’t either. But what can you do, other than sink or swim, win or learn from what seems to be loss?

Ihese are a part of life that almost no one ever escapes unless you divorce yourself  entirely from what is going on around you.

When I was a little girl, up until I was about eight, I lived a near idyllic life. Nothing severe had ever touched me, at least as I recall. Then, overnight my life was turned upside down. After three miscarriages my mother birthed a full term baby girl, named Sharon Iris. What joy! What a miracle! What exhilaration for my parents and for me who would no longer be an only child. 

Just like I had wished for on a star!

But --- whoa – tiny Sharon Iris lived less than two days.

What devastation; the end of paradise for me! And the beginning of a world that seemed never to right itself; one crisis, chaos and tragedy after another!  

Bottom line: I discovered I had to learn to manage, work with, even transform upheaval or die! For me it was that urgent!

Right now the state of affairs surrounding our current society and politics feels like chaos and crisis, of tragedy, I am not so certain. But things sure are challenging.

What are you going to do about it, personally? 

What are we going to do about it, collectively? 

Especially those of us, like myself, who see Donald Trump as dangerous and even mentally off balance and abhor the thought of his taking over the White House.

I despise what I see happening around us in this current presidential campaign cycle, especially coming from the Republican side. But I “looked” at 9/11 as a time of Divine Chaos as that was all I could “see” of it. And I am glad I saw it this way; a painfully important message designed on the level of Divine mystery that had much to teach us Americans. Much that we apparently needed to learn, and perhaps still do.

I don’t know what the message or grander, greater implications of Election 2016 hold, for now and for the long term.

But one thing I do know about circumstances such as we are faced with today – I am a part of a greater whole. And, to be at my best I must align with this whole synergistically or I will be lost! Even if this means adapting my views to support our next elected president whomever that is! Therefore I must lean in to others who are also a part of that whole to work our way through what is presently facing us in America today in our society and politics.

David Brooks of the New York Times in an article titled “If Not Trump, What?” expressed my intent completely when he said –

I don’t know what the new national story will be, but maybe it will be less individualistic and more redemptive. Maybe it will be a story about communities that heal those who suffer from addiction, broken homes, trauma, prison and loss, a story of those who triumph over the isolation, social instability and dislocation so common today.

….. Trump will have his gruesome moment. The time is best spent (for the rest of us) elsewhere, meeting the neighbors who have become strangers, and listening to what they have to say.

Mr. Brooks suggests what I have learned well, but not always easily – 

I know that surviving by transforming within myself to manage what is outside of me has taught me this—

When I lean in to others and give up any isolation (isolation being different than solitude) to actively be a part of the whole, somehow, almost magically, I am stronger and wiser about how to manage challenge than I am alone!

That’s why building small “zones of peace” matters to me!