Order and chaos
Leave anything alone and it drifts. Order is something you choose, build and keep paying for, so the question was never how to get rid of chaos. It's which parts of it are worth a frame, and what happens inside the frame once it holds.
Leave anything alone for a month and it drifts. A desk collects things that were put down for a moment. A codebase grows a little with every fix. An inbox fills. A day with nothing planned in it runs off in whatever direction it was last pushed. None of that needs anyone’s help - it’s what happens when nobody does anything, which is why I think of drift as the default. Order is the opposite. Somebody has to decide that a thing deserves a structure, build that structure, and then keep it up, and every one of those steps costs effort that the drift never asked for.
So for me the question was never how to get rid of chaos, which can’t be done and shouldn’t be tried. The question is which parts of it are worth a frame, and what the frame is for. By a frame I mean any structure you choose to put around a part of your life or your work: a practice you keep at a fixed hour, the rules of a musical form, the way a program is organised. I’ve been circling that question for years across four things I do that otherwise have nothing to do with each other, and what follows is where I’ve got to.
Table of contents
- Chaos came first
- What I mean by chaos
- Chaos is a source
- Built, found and contested
- Complexity you build yourself
- Order is paid for
- Joy and excellence
- Before the day starts
Chaos came first
The word chaos didn’t start out meaning a mess. In the oldest Greek story of how the world began, the very first thing to exist was Chaos, and what the word meant was a gap, an open space with nothing in it yet. Its opposite was cosmos, and cosmos meant an arrangement, things set in good order. The Greeks used the same word for a woman’s ornaments and jewellery, which is where our word cosmetics comes from. So when a mathematician first called the whole universe a cosmos, he was saying two things at once: that it was well arranged, and that it was beautiful. That’s the version of the two words I hold to. Chaos is what’s there first. Order is something that gets made. And when it’s made well, people call it beautiful.
Physics has the same picture of which comes first, and it’s worth seeing why. Think of a room. There are only a handful of ways for everything in it to be where it belongs, and an enormous number of ways for it to be scattered. So if things get moved about at random, a book put down here and a cable dropped there, the room ends up scattered, for no better reason than that scattered has far more ways of happening. A physicist who wrote a small book asking what life is used exactly this picture: the books in a library and the papers on a desk drift towards disorder unless someone keeps putting them back. His real question was how a living body manages to stay ordered when everything around it drifts. His answer was that it keeps pulling order in from outside, all the time, in the form of food, and that the moment it stops, it dies. Nothing keeps its shape for free.
What I mean by chaos
When I say chaos I don’t mean a catastrophe, a flood or a crash. I mean the quiet kind, the drift and the pile-up described above. And I mean something that happens inside as well: the state of looking at a room, or a problem, or my own head, and not finding the shape of it. In a messy room nothing is actually missing. What’s gone is knowing where things are - what goes where, what I can reach for without looking. The discomfort isn’t in anything that’s there. It’s in not being able to read the room.
The mind’s version of this has been studied by the people who study attention, and their description matches mine. Disorder in the head, they say, is information that fights what you’re trying to do or pulls you away from it: a worry, a noise, an argument replaying itself. It has many names depending on how it feels that day, fear or irritation or nerves, but it’s one condition, your attention dragged to things you didn’t choose. The opposite state is when whatever comes into your head fits what you’re doing. Then attention runs by itself, with no effort, and you don’t stop to check on yourself at all. Seen that way, everything I practise is a way of getting from the first state to the second on purpose. An hour at the instrument is an hour in which what comes into my head fits what my hands are doing.
Chaos is a source
None of this makes chaos the enemy. Chaos is energy that hasn’t been given a direction yet, and order is what gets made out of a part of that energy. Physics has a neat demonstration of this too. Take a shallow pan of liquid and heat it gently from below. At low heat, every small stirring in the liquid dies away and nothing happens. Turn the heat up past a certain point and the liquid organises itself into a regular pattern of cells, a bit like a honeycomb, that nobody designed. The pattern exists only while heat is flowing through the liquid - turn the heat off and it’s gone. What this shows is that order appears where something is flowing, and that it’s the flow which holds the order up. So a frame doesn’t work by damping the energy down. It works by pointing the energy somewhere, and it needs the energy as much as the energy needs it.
I learnt this the first time from the music, and I learnt it from the wrong side. A raag is a set of notes with rules about how to move between them, and the aalap is the long, slow opening of a raag - the part played without any beat. To an outsider, which is what I was, the aalap sounds like a musician wandering wherever the mood takes him, and I found it moving for exactly that reason. Every year of lessons since has shown me more of the building in it: which part of the instrument’s range gets explored when, how a phrase is allowed to end, what has to be established before the music can move on. The wandering was real. The frame was what made it possible. Order, in the only sense I care about, is chaos with a direction.
Built, found and contested
The frame isn’t the same thing in each of the four practices, and that difference is most of why I keep all four. In the music I build the frame myself, by hand, over years, and it’s mine to exactly the extent that I’ve put it in. In photography I don’t build the frame at all. It occurs, out on the street, and my work is to be standing in the right place when it does. Taking the colour out of a photograph helps with that, because colour pulls the eye and brings its own mood, so removing it takes away one whole layer of chaos before I start. What’s left is still a street full of competing things, so most of the work is waiting for the scene to arrange itself, which is a patience that has nothing to force.
Tennis is the odd one, because the chaos there has a will of its own. In the other three, the chaos comes out of the material or the problem, and it doesn’t care what I do. Across a net it comes from a person who has a plan for you and changes it as soon as you’ve read it, and it arrives faster than you can think. When a set turns on me, the first thing I do now is split the cause in two, because the two causes need different answers. Either I stopped playing well, my feet went lazy and my swing went short, and then the fix is mine to make. Or he saw a hole in my game and got to it before I could close it. Then I’ve done what I could, so I accept it and carry the pattern into the next week’s practice, where a lost set turns into a drill. A match that’s going well doesn’t feel like the chaos has gone. It feels pointed.
Complexity you build yourself
Engineering is where the frame gets imposed at a scale that no one can hold in their head. The programs I work on run on thousands of processors at the same time, on machines where memory behaves differently depending on how you reach for it. The whole job is to put enough structure on all of that so that it does one specific thing it couldn’t have done loose. When a piece of it finally comes right, a module that someone else could pick up or a parallel problem that stops fighting back, the satisfaction is the same as a note placed well in an aalap.
I also build more of this than I strictly need to. I run my own machines and write my own tools where a hosted version exists, and the reason is the same one. A complexity you built yourself is one you can read, so when it breaks you know where to look. A complexity you inherited hides its structure from you, so when it breaks there’s nothing to read. The other half of the conviction is that the thing you end up with should be simple to use, for whoever uses it, which is often me. The system has to be as complex underneath as the problem asks, and as simple on the surface as I can make it, and I don’t think you get the second without doing the first.
Order is paid for
Order is maintained structure - the cost is never paid once. A tidy room is tidy because the tidying never stopped. A practice holds because the turning up never stopped. In my own field there’s a law with a name that says the same about software. A program that’s in use grows more complex on its own unless work is spent holding it down. Every fix and every new feature adds a little, nobody removes anything, and so the complexity rises until someone spends time cutting it back. Anyone who has kept a codebase alive for a few years already knew that. The living thing that stays ordered only by drawing order in continuously is the same fact one level down. Every structure you decide to keep adds to what you’re carrying.
In my case the cost is the hour before sunrise, the stretch of a raag that goes nowhere and has to be unpicked and tried again, the set that has to be sat with until it makes sense, and the box under the desk that breaks when I’d rather be doing anything else. None of it is romantic. It’s what keeping order costs, day to day, and it’s why I don’t frame everything.
The research on limits backs that up. People have studied what happens to creative work under constraints - deadlines, rules, scarce money - across a large number of studies, and the pattern is the same from every direction. Some limit helps, because it gives the work a shape. Too little of it and people go slack, since with all the time and money in the world nobody has to decide anything. Too much of it and the work chokes. So the useful amount is in the middle, and it has to be chosen. Even a room cuts both ways. When people were put in a tidy room and given choices, they picked the healthier snack and the classic option. Put in a messy room, they came up with more new ideas. So which parts of my life get a frame depends on what I want out of them. Where I can’t see what a structure would produce, I let that chaos be, and I do that as a decision rather than out of comfort, because structure kept for its own sake wears you out faster than anything.
Joy and excellence
Why pay it at all, when the chaos comes back the moment you stop? Two things, and I’ve never found a third: what makes me happy, and what makes me better than I was. For me those aren’t two lists. Whatever gives me real joy also refuses to let me stay comfortable, and whatever gave pleasure without asking anything of me, or asked a lot and gave nothing back, has dropped away over the years without my deciding much about it. The four on this site are what’s left, and each of them has got harder the longer I’ve done it, which I’ve come to think is why they’ve stayed. When something stops getting harder it stops making me better, and once it stops doing that the joy goes out of it too, not all at once, but reliably.
An old philosopher made the same argument long before I did. Pleasure, he said, isn’t a reward paid out after an activity. It’s what completes the activity, the way a bloom completes youth, something that comes on top of it and finishes it. He also said that the pleasure that belongs to an activity sharpens it, because people who work with pleasure judge better and are more precise. A pleasure from somewhere else wrecks whatever it interrupts - his example was a flute playing while someone is trying to follow an argument. That’s my experience exactly. What I’m after is the channelling itself: the moment when the chaos is going where I pointed it and I can do a little more than I could the day before. That moment is there every time I sit down, whatever the output turns out to be.
Before the day starts
My practice starts at five, before work, and the part of that which belongs in this essay is what the hour does to the material. Before the day has put anything into my head, what I bring to the instrument is whatever state I got out of bed in, and the raag takes that and gives it a direction. What I want from the hour is direction, never calm. The same goes for a frame on a street corner at the end of an afternoon, or a set at the academy. Every one of these forms takes what I arrive with and points it, and that’s the reason I keep choosing them.
My own tradition had this the right way round from the start. One of the creation hymns in the Rig Veda says that order and truth were born from heat, from tapas, which is the same word the tradition uses for the effort of a person who practises hard, the heat of discipline. And it gives that order a god whose job is to guard it, because order is the kind of thing that needs a guard. Chaos was there first and it’s still the default. Order is chosen, it’s paid for, and inside it something happens that I can’t get any other way. That’s my working position, for now.