Finding Right Rhythms (Part 1)

Part One: Right Rhythms in Time

In what has become a relatively famous quote, Annie Dillard reminds us that “how we spend our days is…how we spend our lives.” In subsequent lines, less often quoted, she argues for the importance of establishing and maintaining the discipline of a set schedule which “defends against chaos and whim.”  She goes on to suggest that the ordered consistency of such a schedule acts as “a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time… a lifeboat on which [we] find [ourselves], decades later, still living” (from The Writing Life).  

What do we do at such times as this, when all the familiar routines of classes, jobs, meetings, and other obligations suddenly fall away indefinitely? How do we spend our days (and by extension our lives)?   

Some might object to Dillard’s claims by arguing that the imposition of a schedule can become a straitjacket, squelching spontaneity, innovation, and creativity.  In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton uses the idea of a walled space to explore that tension. The walls may, to some, appear as a constraining prison that limits freedom and stunts growth, but in fact, those walls serve as the protective parameter for play, offering the safety and security we need to run wild and fail and fall without fear of tumbling headlong off the cliff’s edge into chaos. 

In his book Brainstorm, Dan Siegel illustrates a similar notion in the figure of a river running between two opposing banks. On one side, we have chaos, on the other rigidity, while “the central flow is one of integration and the harmony it creates” (55).  This is a picture of an ordered process that is neither too rigid nor too chaotic for movement, growth, and progress to occur. 

Illustration appears on page 55 of BrainStorm by Dan Siegel.

As Siegel goes on to argue, “When things are chaotic, they are out of control, wild, overwhelming, completely unpredictable. And when things are rigid, they are stuck, unchanging, boring, and completely predictable” (55-56). In other words, both extremes lead to the mire of static stagnation and stuck-ness, where the ideal of life is a dynamic “movement toward” a goals that reasonably attainable but also audacious enough to keep us striving, moving, and growing. 

This polarity between unmitigated chaos and rigid order provides the basic thematic framework for Jordan Peterson’s books Maps of Meaning and the international best-seller 12 Rules for Life. In Peterson’s conception, Order and Chaos both have their positive and negative affects. In its positive sense, Order includes “the world of social structure, explored territory, and familiarity…but when pushed too far, when imbalanced, can also manifest itself destructively and terribly” in the form of a too rigid totalitarianism such as we find in concentration camps or systems of mass incarceration. An appropriate level of Chaos, on the other hand, “is possibility itself, the source of ideas, the mysterious realm of gestation and birth. As a negative force, it’s the “impenetrable darkness of a cave” where danger and destruction lurk (Rules, xxxviii, 40-41). Peterson goes on to suggest that the goal is “to straddle that fundamental duality…to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, the other in chaos, possibility, growth, and adventure” (43).  

Note the common thread in these various related ideas: we need both regulation and freedom to achieve a fluid process through our days and ways—the sweet spot of a balanced, harmonious, integrated flow—a state many athletes, artists, and others refer to as being in the Zone. But there’s a tipping point on either side of that balance—a point beyond which, on one bank, the fertile mess and the potential for generative wildness of choice becomes a barren waste of chaos and confusion, and beyond which on the other bank, the scaffolding of our schedules and routines become a barred cage of perfectionism and creative paralysis. 

In “The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle,” the poet Tom Andrews celebrates the value of friends who teach us 

to find for [ourselves] the right rhythm of wildness and precision, when to hold

                        back and when to let go (76). 

That strikes me as the best, most apt way to describe this apparent conundrum. What we’re pursuing are the right rhythms of wildness and precision. 

This is the juxtaposition we find in two of Mary Oliver’s last poems—“Don’t Worry” and “Moments” which appear in close proximity in her collection called Felicity. The first is very short and reads, in its entirety: 

                        Things take the time they take. Don’t worry. 

                        How many roads did St. Augustine follow

                            before he became St. Augustine? 

“Moments,” by way of contrast, opens: 

                        There are moments that cry out to be fulfilled

and concludes: 

                        There is nothing more pathetic than caution 

                        when headlong might save a life, 

                        even, possibly, your own.  (3, 9) 

As mentioned above, these poems appear in the same collection, and I love the way Oliver’s work holds these apparently contradictory notions in tension—letting things take the time they take and recognizing when headlong and reckless abandon is called for. By what criteria can we discern when it’s appropriate to hold back--cultivating the Spirit-fruit of patience—and when passivity (fueled, perhaps, by fear, sloth, procrastination, irresponsibility, or shame) may be masquerading as a counterfeit patience. 

In other words, when is it appropriate to let go—to pursue the passion headlong, taking big necessary risks and accepting the consequences.  In the triangulated center between patience, passivity, and headlong pursuit of our passion, we pray for the serenity to accept what we can’t change—or can’t change yet—the courage to change what we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. 

This dovetails with a poem from Rilke’s Book of Hours—

                        I want to free what waits within me

                        …

                        May what I do flow from me like a river, 

                           no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children. 

This mention of children points back to Chesterton’s prison/playground analogy, reminding us of the importance of structure in maintaining a spirit of playfulness, curiosity, and wonder, as well as a willingness to fail and to learn from our failure. The larger conceit also invokes Siegel’s riparian metaphor of integration and flow—a movement forward and toward with neither forcing nor holding back.  

It’s all of a piece, as the idea of integration implies that “the differentiated parts [of a system] retain their unique aspects and they also become linked” into a functioning, coordinated, and balanced whole (Siegel, 55). Thus the notion of integration is intimately related to the notion integrity—to the health and wholeness of our entire selves: hearts, minds, souls, and bodies. 

As we navigate spaces fraught with enormous peril and potential, how can we let things take the time they take without giving over to worry, anxious striving, or the ‘tyranny of the urgent’? How, simultaneously, can we remain ready at all times and in all seasons to take headlong advantage of every opportunity when and where it arises? What sort of scaffolding or schedule, what routines or rhythms, will enable us to cultivate generative practices that get us working and keep us working in focused and disciplined ways in the flowing current between rigidity and chaos?