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Chaos & Order
“Your brain signals to you that you are in the right place by making what you’re doing meaningful. That sense of meaning is actually a neurophysiological signal that you’ve got the forces of the cosmos properly balanced in your being at that moment. And that’s why it feels so good.” - Jordan B. Peterson
The Journal Prompt
Insightful Journal Prompts Delivered Weekly.
Good morning!
Welcome back to The Journal Prompt, your weekly companion for introspection and personal growth. 🌿
This week, we’ll dive into the theme of Chaos & Order.
Let’s get started!
In This Week’s Issue (9-minute Read)
💬 Quote of the Week
🖼️ Framing Your Reflection
✍️ Three Insightful Journal Prompts
☯️ Featured Photo & Affirmations
Quote of the Week 💬
“Your brain signals to you that you are in the right place by making what you’re doing meaningful. That sense of meaning is actually a neurophysiological signal that you’ve got the forces of the cosmos properly balanced in your being at that moment. And that’s why it feels so good.”
Framing Your Reflection 🖼️
Have you ever seen a gymnast perform the uneven bars? The things the human body can do are marvelous.
Amazement aside…consider two Olympic gymnasts performing their routines.
The first gymnast has perfect execution of her routine - the 10,000+ hours of dedicated practice are evident. When she lands, judges give her 9.8….9.8….9.7. And the crowd claps as she walks off.
The second gymnast, also perfect execution, but her performance feels….heavier.
You can see the routine stretching her to the limits of her abilities. Her moves are daring - she is risking the performance of her life.
You feel on edge watching because you don’t quite know if she’ll make it. Every flip and bar switch makes you squirm in your seat. 🫢
Finally……she sticks the landing and you (along with the crowd) leap to your feet and roar with joy. 🙌
Why do we feel differently if both performed perfectly?
More importantly….how is it that an entire stadium full of mostly strangers and feels the same thing? 🤔
It’s because the second gymnast was better than perfect. She was perfect in the way that will make her more perfect in the future. That’s why we leap to our feet - because that is where meaning lies…..in treading the line carefully between Chaos and Order.
One of the pernicious 💀 dangers of life masquerading as a virtue is comfort.
We avoid things that are uncomfortable, often lying to ourselves by saying things like:
“It’s just not for me”
“That’s so toxic”
“I deserve better than this”
In order to feel that comfort - by definition - we need to be where we know things.
It makes things predictable, gives us a sense of safety, and we feel competent because when we do ‘X’, result ‘Y’ always happens……….always.
The problem with only being where we know things, with everything in its proper place and in Order, is that we don’t know everything. And staying here for too long creates a survival problem for our future self.
The world changes regardless of whether we want it to. We’ve been there….everything going “as planned” and then…..sudden death of a loved one, job loss, physical illness, family feud, etc.
On the flip side, being only where we know nothing is pure Chaos. And that sucks. It induces panic/mania because we never know when anything is going to happen, nor how to handle it should it occur. Bad place to be.
Anyone whose been able to escape from dire straits knows the feeling of seeing darkness everywhere, and then having a moment of revelation, or an opportunity present itself that we just seized and ascended with it.
But are we really “destined” to just ping pong 🏓 between these two extremes? Or is the middle path?
Short answer: yes. The path is called Meaning. And we see clues of it in both evolutionary biology and metaphysics.
The Brain 🧠
Those 6 inches between our ears have evolved to do one thing - interpret Reality as close to reality as possible. Nature has selected for this, so paying attention to its structure yields a unique insight - we have a left and right hemisphere, and generally speaking, each has a job.
The Left is where routine work is done (Order), and the Right deals with all the things you don’t know (Chaos).
Once we’ve secured ourselves enough physiologically to know our world isn’t going to fall out from under us (and legitimate chemical imbalances aside), we have to be out there enough so that we keep updating ourselves constantly.
In between Chaos and Order is where information flow is optimized. You’ve experienced it when you’ve been captured by a good book, an interesting conversation, an amazing movie, or perhaps in your work/hobby when you have lost track of time. Your brain made it feel good = meaningful.
Living in Dao ☯️
Each side of the Ying Yang symbol represents Chaos and Order, and they contain a small dot of the other inside themselves. Each has the potential to emerge from the other, and to “Live in Dao” is to live in the proper manner, and that’s the literally line dividing Chaos and Order. 🤯
A gentle reminder as we go to journal - the writing you do is a conversation with yourself. The purpose of a true conversation is to feel understood, and through understanding the other, come away having learned something new.
We can’t do that if we are just mindlessly writing affirmations - or use the “positive” writing to avoid the painful but necessary. Your intention with yourself (and the community of selves through Time which encompasses the complexity of your being) must be genuine - to speak the Truth for the purpose of forging a better Reality.
Everything we want in life is on the other side of a few tough conversations - that includes the ones we need to have with ourselves 🪞
Three Journal Prompts ✍️
🔍 Prompt #1: Time Not On Your Mind
Examine a previous experience where you were so wrapped up in the moment feeling amazing that you lost track of time. Was it a book, a conversation, an activity? Can you recall when this happened in childhood? Look for patterns.
🧠 Prompt #2: Check Your Spirit Diet
If we are going to be guided by our sense of meaning, we can’t feed our spirit garbage. We do this by the things that we read and watch, but most insidiously, by the lies we tell ourselves. When we lie, we pathologize our meaning instinct, warping our inner compass so that it starts to point at things it shouldn’t be pointing to.
Examine your media diet. But also, explore the lies you may be telling yourself. They are typically statements that assign you an identity that gives you validation in the eyes of others but that you know are not true about who you are or who you’d like to be.
🔄 Prompt #3: Would Future You Appreciate It
Since you are a community selves spread out across time, zoom out for this prompt and think about the regular day-to-day things you are doing, and if you did them every day for 10 years, consider whether your future self would thank you for them.
🎁 Cool Helpful Bonus Thingies
If you want to dive deeper into the psychology behind how we can deal with Chaos and Order, and you are truly ready for a deep book that will rattle the way you think about the world, highly recommend the two below👇
Featured Photo & Affirmations ☯️
Photo by Дмитрий Хрусталев-Григорьев
Affirmation for Chaos & Order
"I will walk the path of Meaning"
As we dive deeper into understanding ourselves, let’s remember that we are not alone. Writing is healing and healing can hurt - reach out to friends and family. They are there for you.
Sending Good Vibes,
Sloan from The Journal Prompt Team
What did you think of this week's edition? |