My theory is simple. You must have chaos to sustain life. I'm not quoting Jeff Goldblum here although I do recall his Jurassic Park explanation made sense to me at the time. I know it had to do with chaos being essential to life, evolution, natural selection and all that. One look at my life and you will see that it is fully immersed in chaos; miles, eons away from perfect and orderly. Almost everything about it is wild, disheveled, and unkempt, clean down to my hair. I’ll never have neat hair. These curls will never be tamed no matter how much I pay someone to fix them and try to make me look polished. It just isn’t going to happen. It seems as though the universe is opposed to my having order in my life. A synchronized schedule, path, orbit, clean house, neat as a pin yard, car, hair; these things elude me.
Just tonight, I wanted to write a song. I sang it over and over on my drive home from work. I didn’t have my little recorder with me, so I tried hard to burn it into my mind through repetition. I pictured how it might go: the musicians collaborating, the recording session where everyone loves it, the radio play, the record label, the house in the hills. But I walked in the door and couldn’t find my notebook to write down the lines of the chorus. I settled for a quick scribble in my sketch pad, and then I had to get my son to bed. Of course he did not want to go. We gently rocked to the Beatles in his dark room. He nursed and fell asleep. When I tried to lay him down, he popped up, too tired to sleep, and cried a bit. The chaos in his little mind was making him restless. He tossed and kicked. I lay down with him and patted his back until he settled for a position on his stomach and found sleep. I looked down at his closed eyes and was reminded how precious and rare these little moments are.
So what if my hair is a mess and I can’t remember my hit single now. This is the good stuff. This is what I live for.
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