CQ

So, how much chaos do you need? Do you like keep­ing every­thing on an even keel or are you the sort of per­son that upsets the apple cart? There is a need for both. Which one are you?

Per­son­ally, I need a lit­tle bit of chaos. I do not believe in chaos just for its own sake, and I have learned to avoid peo­ple that use it to try to con­trol oth­ers. There are chaos quo­tients (I have dubbed it CQ — a lit­tle like IQ). I am com­fort­able with some but not with oth­ers. The same is most likely true for you too.

We humans seek our pain; we are not con­tent sim­ply to sit and stare out of the win­dow all day. Life needs some stim­u­la­tion. With­out it, life atro­phies and dies. Cul­tures that exist in extreme weather areas seem to be much more cre­ative. The chaos on the out­side stirs a lit­tle on the inside. From the dis­tur­bance comes all sorts of novel things. (Cer­tain lat­i­tudes seem to cre­ate more entre­pre­neur­ial cultures.)

If you grew up in chaos, you may find your­self cre­at­ing a cer­tain level of it all of the time in order to feel secure. The mind seeks bal­ance; if there is a war on the inside there will be a cor­re­spond­ing list of cre­ated con­flicts on the out­side. The lev­els are dif­fer­ent for each indi­vid­ual. As we mature, we lower the lev­els because we no longer have the energy for them. That is good or bad — depend­ing on how you look at it. Some peo­ple drown in their own self-generated chaos. They lack a tran­scen­dent style that can keep them above it.

Peace is not the absence of chaos, it is still­ness within it. For those that have lived through a lot of tri­als, the calmest moment may be when a dozen things are hap­pen­ing at once. Chaos is no longer a threat — just an oppor­tu­nity to take its ener­gies and cre­ate some­thing totally unique. There is a knack for this — a sort of CQ style. Find yours and put it to work. Best of all, have some fun with it.