Food for Thought - Noise

Light Chaos by kevindooley

Some Sundays I read every part of the New York Times, other weeks I don't get to it.  But when I do, I generally find something interesting and this week was no exception.  In the Sunday Style section this week was a book review of The Information, by James Gleick, called "There's No Quiet Without Noise."  Noise, as used in this article, is defined as anything, anywhere, that disturbs the harmony of the moment.  The thesis of the article is that we need noise, some disturbance of equilibrium, to have peace.  As Mr. Gleick puts it, "A piece of music is boring if it's completely predictable, and boring if it's completely unpredictable...what we respond to is a mixture of order and disorder."

I don't pretend to understand chaos theory, but my idea of it has been that there is an underlying harmony to everything, even if it's not detectable at the time.  Maybe the pattern is too large to see from the current vantage point in time or space.  It's my philosophy of life that everything works out for the best, that everything that happens is part of some larger, mysterious "plan" that will eventually resolve itself for the good of everyone concerned.  In my own life, the events that were tragic at the time may have closed one door, but allowed the opening of another, better one.

The thought that there is discord just for the sake of discord is, well, jarring to me.  Or maybe it's the shot of lemon juice that forces us to make lemonade.  Because our lives are really up to us.  Each of us has to take the cards we're dealt and arrange them into the best hand possible.  If every once in a while, there's an extra ace, or a joker, we still have to deal with it.  And that's what makes life not boring, isn't it?