Some days are just chaotic.

‘Randomness is a concept that defies categorisation; by definition, it comes out of nowhere and can’t be anticipated.’*

Randomness is the stuff we navigate every day of our lives, though often don’t notice.**

From childhood, we are doing just this.  Former MIT researcher in Brain and Cognitive Sciences Frank Sulloway suggests that personality is our strategy for surviving childhood.  Ron and Ben Zander pick up on this, suggesting:

‘A child comes to think of himself as the personality he gets recognition for, or, in other words, as the set of patterns of actions and habits of thought that get him out of childhood in one piece.’^

Personality propels us from childhood into adulthood, but often with an unquestioning acceptance of everything, positive and negative.

When unaware we continue to think in survival terms when there’s no longer any need,  The Zanders call this the “calculating self” – surviving or progressing within the human hierarchy, the world of measurement.

When we become aware of this, we see how the human journey is an incredible odyssey of discerning what we need and do not need in order to become more human, into the universe of possibility.  We’re only just beginning:

‘When one person peels away layers of opinion, entitlement, pride, and inflated self-description, others instantly feel connection.’^

(*From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc.)
(**Arriving on time with everyday journeys relies on hundreds if not thousands of things working together in the right way.  Normally the differences may alter the journey by a few minutes, but add an accident and roadworks and diversion (like today!) and the journey time doubles – including the person who drove out of a side road straight in front of me.  Though, all of this is pretty mild stuff in a universe as random as ours, and this is what we must grow up into.)
(^From Rosamund and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility.)