Sometimes, when enough things change in your life in a short enough time, you feel like you’re being overwhelmed, like you are lost amidst the chaos surrounding you. It is a draining and very unpleasant experience, and it can make people who normally seem unflappable completely at a loss.
That feeling of chaos can come from many different areas of your life… changes in your finances, your relationship, your job, or any other major thing in your life can trigger it. It generally arises more from changes you perceive as negative than ones you perceive as positive, but if the positive changes are big enough, it can alter enough other things to leave you with somewhat of a feeling of chaos, too.
I recently went through this feeling myself, much of which was due to massive changes in my job. I still work from the same office, and I still have the same boss, at least technically, but much else has changed.
The company that I worked for sold off the piece where I worked, meaning that not only do I now work for someone else, but we have to take over things that were previously supported by the larger company… in the case of our department, this includes things like email and desktop support. At the same time, my boss was moved from the facility where I work to the other facility that the company who bought us owns, and had enough new work piled upon him that I seldom see him.
That means, essentially, that there are now two people doing the work that previously was being handled by six people. Add in to this the fact that the sale of the company was on again/off again and the general change and adjusting surrounding such processes, and it adds up to a large amount of change in a small time, meaning I started feeling that chaos was overwhelming me.
I got past this feeling by learning, or more accurately by being reminded, of one lesson: If you want to wrench order from chaos in your life, you must take responsibility and you must take action.
Order, or at least the human perception of it, doesn’t come naturally. Nature is full of chaos and random chance, not the planning and structure that our minds crave. That means that someone, at some point, has to step in and take action to change the natural course in order for that structure to be built.
A structure can be built with action alone, but if you want it to be of study construction, there needs to be responsibility, as well. Imagine a workplace filled with people who won’t take responsibility for their work or their actions (not too hard for some people to imagine, I’m sure)… the business will flounder, going nowhere due to lack of direction, and no one will want to work there because of the negative atmosphere.
The same thing applies to relationships, as well… if no one takes responsibility for taking the necessary actions to maintain and strengthen the relationship, then it won’t get done. If it doesn’t get done, the relationship will gradually fall apart, with neither person particularly wanting to be in the relationship any more… although both may be sad to look back and see what they lost, see where the relationship used to be.
If you want order in your life, a solid structure upon which to stand and be confident, there is only one person you can turn to: you. You are the only person who is involved in every aspect of your life, and the only one who can take responsibility for the actions necessary to make your structure strong enough to stand up to the occasional hits it will take as you go through life.
If you feel like your life is in chaos, or if you feel like you’re not really getting anywhere in life, take a look in the mirror and ask yourself a question. Are waiting for someone else to come in and hand you things on a silver platter, or are you taking responsibility for yourself, doing what needs to be done in order to move ahead?
If it’s the first, then be aware… even if you are lucky, and are the one in a million who doeshave someone give you what you want, you’re likely to lose it again before long if you don’t change. Look at all the lottery winners who end up worse off than before they won… someone handed them money, they acted without responsibility, and they gained nothing. They may even have not learned their lesson.
Do you want to be free from the chaos in your life? Do you want to be, and feel, successful? All it takes to start down that path is to take responsibility for yourself and your actions… when you see something that needs to be done, stand up and take that responsibility and get it done.
You’ll make everyone who is still waiting for someone else to fix things happier!
