Chaos is usually thought of as complete disorder and confusion, but it can also be understood as formless matter and energy existing before creation. Chaos invites the feeling that anything and everything can happen at any given moment, and it simultaneously includes a sense of nonlinearity that is sensitive to being influenced over time. This is sometimes called the butterfly effect, which is the idea that a small change in a complex system in one place can have a huge impact in another place. This is not to say that a small change directly causes a huge impact, only that chaos is sensitive to small changes.

In the chaos of recent times, uncertainty and instability have become common themes of experience. Many of you, in your uncertainty, use time to provide a sense of equilibrium in the midst of chaos. You identify what has been and what is yet to come, and you place yourselves right in the middle of these notions, believing that you have some sense of stability in your lives. It is natural to do this because whenever there are three points of reference (before, now, and after), a steadiness is generated, as three points of reference construct a very stable geometry.

We suggest, however, that maintaining this geometry is impossible. Every “now” you identify by describing a “before” and an “after” is momentary at best and constantly changing. It becomes easy to see that this moment-to-moment stability is an illusion and that it is fragile in terms of a strategy to create stability.