Note to Self: Let’s End the Chaos.
I’ve noticed something over the past few years - a kind of “underlying” problem that has made the trials and tribulations of life harder than they should be. I’m a child of the 80s, when we saw the future as a place where walls came down, ideas soared up and people went boldly where they’d never gone before. Where leaders helped turn the future into the promised land - not by having any particular prescription - but simply by staving off:
Chaos.
It seems that increasingly, people I talk to are more bewildered than ever. We have many of the same challenges we’ve always had, but the path to solving them is extraordinarily cluttered with chaos. Nobody seems to know how to “solve” anything anymore because we’ve become increasingly disoriented by people who strut and fret and yell and slap and twerk across our lives.
As someone recently said to me: Things just seem so ugly lately.
Too many moments - on our screens, in public spaces - take away our sense of decorum. It’s become a fashion to flaunt politeness and disrupt most daily interactions. It’s high culture to think Up is down.
There’s research that said Hot is cold. The government declares that bees are fish.
And when that little voice inside your head says, wait, something isn’t right here, we struggle to find the thread because we’re in the midst of being intentionally and constantly
Disoriented.
It’s difficult enough that our minds do this to ourselves. We generate a lot of life-sapping fears and doubts and drains on our own, without needing more help. When we look around for help - from friends and neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens - we’re looking for the heroes who can say:
I’m here to help. Let me show you a way.
And yet every day, I can’t but notice the chaos is encroaching. It’s not just the cynical slatherings of media headlines. It’s the reality show on camera of people destroying a fast food restaurant over dipping sauce. Drinking to drunkenness in airports and sidewalks and movie theaters. Of having to put our two cents into every conversation: Because the private is gone. We’re all the public now.
Tricked into becoming agents of Chaos.
About this, our leaders say nothing, offer nothing, speak in verbal salads, and leave audiences not inspired but bewildered. They speak in tweets and change their minds in whims, and destroy immeasurable sums of capital (human and financial) without accountability. They don’t worry that we can sense it’s all a joke:
As long as it feeds the chaos.
So I recommit myself every day:
Just do your part.
Don’t be an agent of disruption.
Don’t spread difficulty but clear away distraction.
Don’t make the moment about yourself when your opportunity - maybe even your purpose - is to be a leader who helps someone else make a difference.
And maybe, just maybe, we’ll stop worrying about just spreading two-more-cents of chaos out there.
And get back on the path of good sense.
Just a thought.
#alwaysinspiring