From Chaos to Calm
What Fractals Taught Me About Anxiety
I recently had a therapist friend say to me, “most the time I feel like I do a good job juggling all the balls, but in summer… in summer, I feel like I’m dropping things left and right.”
😮💨 That absolutely landed for me, and perhaps you too?
As I reflect on the familiar feelings of summertime chaos, I realize that what I am seeing is a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that occurs in nature. While the fractal itself, the pattern, is quite simple, the picture it displays can be one of chaos.
“A fractal tells a story of the processes that created it.”
These fractals appear everywhere. In nature, in mathematics, even in Jackson Pollock's paint splatters… and if this is true, if they really are everywhere, might they also be present in the intangible, invisible aspects of our lives? Might they be present in our actions and our feelings?
If we can do the deep work of tracing back through the chaotic feelings to the largest possible branch we can find, we might discover an incredibly simple pattern. A pattern that goes something like - everytime X happens, I respond with Y, which makes me a bit anxious or unhappy. And, then this pattern continues to repeat, creating CHAOS.
Our meditation practice is the invitation to interrupt this pattern. It invites us to pause in the repetitive choices we make, and it allows us to give ourselves the space to make a new choice.
Patience and consistency will deliver the results. They always do. So in this most chaotic season, may you breathe deeply and practice more consistently than ever.
Thank you to Nick McMahan for today’s nature field recordings, sound design, and editing; and thank you to Brianna Nielsen for production and editing support.
TBR: Is A River Alive?
Inspired after listening to an interview with author Robert Macfarlane, I picked up his newest book from the library -
Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.
Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada--imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, a stream who flows through his own years and days.
Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers--and always has.
I’m currently dreaming up some new meditation series, and I think a river series is imminent ;-) Psst. Rivers are also fractals!!
So tell me, what are you reading right now??
