We long for order. We fight for order. We spend money on boxes, bins, baskets, labels, label makers, file labels, file folders, file cabinets, cupboards, closets, containers, crypts, efficiency experts, and efficiency systems. All to create to order.

We despair when order eludes us. I sure do. I think this longing for order and certainty is a metaphor for fighting against life’s inevitable outcome. We all disappear and dissolve into chaos eventually. We depart this world. This is non-negotiable. Not knowing what awaits us after death (if anything) has been the subject of speculation for centuries.

Still, we often negotiate like crazy against impending darkness and often do so right up until the very end. For all the good it does us. I think I have devised a way to make friends with death. Well, my own death anyway. I have lived so many realities in my time on this planet and have never settled all that comfortably into any of them.

When your early life begins in chaos, you learn to distrust order. You long for it but when it is upended and taken away so often, order becomes suspect and sterile. People living in peace and order – went my dysfunctional thinking – live in denial and delusion. Not only that, their lives are undoubtedly dry and boring. This was my comfortable justification for something I did not have and was uncertain I could ever achieve.

It is true that on this planet, order is essential to success. That is why we have a gazillion systems and products and recommendations for how to achieve it. To play the game of life successfully (in our culture, at least), you must have your ducks in a row. At law school, I met earnest young lawyers-to-be who were not particularly intellectually gifted, but I was consumed by suffering and envy for the order in their course notes.

My cousin Pat Good is a quilter and more generally, a fabric artist. Quilting requires order and an ungodly level of patience and stick-to-it-ism. As do any of the creative arts. Would you read this if my thoughts and words were helter-skelter all over the page and disconnected? I didn’t think so.

Writing has been a discipline of self-imposed order on a chaotic environment. Mom betrayed me? I wrote down exactly what she did (supported my ex-husband over me) and how I felt about it (confused and devastated, naturally). I don’t trust my memory more than anyone else should. But when it is right there, written down in blue and white (my preferred inkpen color), years later, I can still read and recall the truth of that moment.

That has helped me in many ways. When I was being gaslighted by my mother or ridiculed and dismissed by my mother, the journals I kept took me back to my truth as it had been in that moment.

There was one particularly telling exchange with my mother. I told her I kept a journal and had written down the details of our many confrontations after they happened and her decidedly unmotherly actions: “You could have made all that up!” she chortled. But I didn’t.

There is order I see and believe in daily and that is in nature. Unlike humans, nature doesn’t busy itself with running around changing its’ environment willy-nilly exclusively for power and monetary gain. The path of nature unfolds in some kind of divine order that I am never going to fully get in this lifetime.

We are born but let’s face it, we don’t know where the hell we came from. We know the biology and have fiddled with that dramatically in recent years. But where does the spark of creation come from? Damned if I know.

What I do know or believe is in “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” we came from the great formlessness and to it we will one day return. I am slowly getting this. In our writer’s group the other day, the ethereal and spiritually evolved Anrael Lovejoy said words to the effect – lest I misquote her – “We are formless before we are conceived and after death, return to formlessness.” Ever insightful and a thinker of deep thoughts is my friend, Anrael.

Everything we do – from birth to grave in the middle – are finger-tapping exercises. Best then that we have fun with the time we’ve been allotted.