Life as Mess
“My life is a mess.” This phrase, so often spoken, took on new meaning after a friend wrote it. Having invested her life savings with a contemporary con artist, she lost it all. His pitch was the usual assured gain without contribution. Hers had been with her all of her life. She had worked twenty years, double shifts to contribute to a “secure future.” Her embarrassment, shame, grief and bitterness were necessary accompaniments to her loss.
What is a mess? The dictionary defines it as “a dirty, untidy or disordered condition.” But how do we know what tidy or order is? In order to know disorder or tidiness we must have a preconception of how discrete objects external to each other are related in space. Things otherwise are as they are. There are no messes in nature, only a perpetual coming into being. What characterizes life is that it is inwardly dynamic and is partially determined. Inanimate objects have no inner dynamic and are fully determined; they are finished products. Objects external to each other are quantifiable by nature of their very externality and the rules of logic are a direct consequence. For example, in a logical universe, two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time.
So it struck me that the expression, “My life is a mess,” is a function of a quantitative way of seeing. The referred to “life” is not perceived as inwardly dynamic but static and fully determined. It is as if (as scientists often do) a grid has been placed over what is otherwise dynamic in order to measure it: the grid of tidiness and order. Making a process quantifiable, by nature, allows only those elements that fit within the grid and are therefore arbitrarily made external to each other to be measured. Otherwise, in a dynamic process, successive stages are seen only in retrospect. What was is no longer. What will be is unknown. My friend was ashamed, embarrassed, and grief stricken because things did not add up. The ‘secure future,’ the end product of the sum of “life as thing”, did not add up.
There are unseen consequences to this way of seeing. Most likely one who experiences a mess is prone to tidying up, ordering or making sense out of it. Much effort could be exerted in these directions only to wind up with greater confusion, greater disorder and untidiness. But certainly, one would ask how could ordering disorder make more of a mess? Surely one cannot live in a state of anarchy. Yet if the sense of order or tidiness, so importantly conditioned by our environment – we would all speak at once without it – with its requirement to see life as object, can blind one to participating in one’s own coming into being. A man obsessed with freedom is still in the chains of an obsession. As long as one’s attention is fixated on rearranging or tidying, one misses awareness of life as dynamic coming into being and must always find a ‘mess’ within the confines of the organizing tidying grid.
We are all familiar with the extreme of the ordering tendency in obsessive compulsives. However, without awareness of its operation, many systems of thought and belief destructive to human understanding have emerged that have actually been rewarded as beneficial. Scholasticism is one example in which the propensity to meet the demand for order has produced bizarre systems of thought and ideologies that have resulted in perpetuating ignorance and at times outright violence to the human race. In psychology and religion there are many belief systems purporting to comprehend humanity while serving a need for tidiness. The result has been not understanding but well ordered cults that have served only to diminish understanding. It is not unusual for scientific ‘advances’ to be made after someone has made a mess in the laboratory
It is the tyranny of expectancy unnoticed that is the source of “mess.” When the expectancy of order or tidiness operates without awareness, one can be either disappointed or pleased. Both are illusions. In disappointment the expectancy is not met and a process of coming into being is perceived as a finished product. If the expectancy is met one can feel pleased or that ‘sense’ has been made out of the non-sense of coming into being. This leaves one closed to what will happen. In either case, openness and with it learning is precluded. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put Humpty together again.
Even worse, is when one’s penchant for order or tidiness fits preconceptions for future events. This is the point when ‘things’ (events) add up. It is a certainty at such times that pessimism or optimism – both forms of certainty – will rule.
One can free oneself from the tyranny of expectancy but not without hard work. It is hard because one must learn to de-automate the quantitative way of seeing while learning participative consciousness. This does not mean that one replaces the quantitative way. Rather the participative mode acts in a complimentary fashion so that with knowledge one can choose to see the same facts differently. If I know that the “mess” I am seeing is my own construction then I necessarily know what is there is what is there- independent of my feeling state. The work requires the cultivation of openness, forbearance and patience; easily seen in the finished product mode as virtues, extremely difficult to develop as an on-going capacity perpetually coming into being. One is no longer ruled by the propensity for order or tidiness. One rules it.