Is a little chaos actually good for us?

If you’d asked me this question twenty years ago, I’d probably have said no.

Chaos was something to be avoided. Something that interrupted plans, made life difficult, and generally arrived at exactly the wrong moment. Like seagulls at a picnic or printers five minutes before a deadline.

These days?

I think chaos gets a bit of an unfair reputation.

Don’t get me wrong—I wouldn’t recommend living in constant turmoil. None of us thrive under endless stress. We all need moments of calm, stability and routine. They allow us to recover, reflect and simply breathe.

But the opposite is equally true.

Too much order can become its own prison.

Nature understands this far better than we do. Every ecosystem exists because opposing forces work together. Growth and decay. Creation and destruction. Day and night. Even at the smallest level, the universe is a constant dance between order and randomness.

Without variation, nothing evolves.

Without disruption, nothing adapts.

Without a little chaos… life becomes remarkably stagnant.

As artists, I think we understand this instinctively.

The perfect photograph rarely happens because everything went exactly to plan. Sometimes it’s the unexpected shaft of light breaking through the clouds. The bird that lands exactly where you weren’t expecting it. The rain that forces you to see a familiar landscape from a completely different perspective.

Poetry works much the same way.

Some of my favourite lines have arrived uninvited, usually while my brain has wandered off somewhere else entirely. They weren’t carefully engineered. They simply appeared, carrying truths I hadn’t consciously realised I was thinking about.

Chaos has a habit of introducing ideas that routine never would.

Science even backs this up.

Complex systems often need a degree of randomness to remain healthy. Too much order leads to rigidity. Too much chaos leads to collapse. Somewhere in the middle lies resilience—the ability to bend without breaking.

Perhaps we’re not so different.

We need structure to keep us grounded.

We need unpredictability to keep us growing.

The trick isn’t eliminating chaos.

It’s learning not to fear it.

Some of the biggest changes in my own life arrived disguised as disruption. At the time they felt uncomfortable, even frightening. Looking back, many of them became turning points that led me somewhere better than I’d originally planned.

Life has an odd sense of humour like that.

It rarely asks permission before teaching us something important.

So yes, I think a little chaos is good for us.

Not because it’s pleasant.

Not because it’s easy.

But because it reminds us that we’re still capable of adapting, creating and discovering new versions of ourselves.

After all, if every painting were perfectly symmetrical, every poem followed exactly the same rhythm, and every photograph captured the obvious angle…

Art would become predictable.

And life would be rather dull.

Sometimes it’s the beautifully untidy bits that make the whole picture worth looking at.

Stay safe,

Bc