I just finished my first day of basic self-defense training, and I’m left with a sense of how small I really am. I barely reached the shoulder of the poleepkwa who was training alongside me; it’s safe to say that I was much weaker then them too. In a rational person’s brain, this would be mulled over for a while and a conclusion would be struck: “I should learn how to defend myself.” It’s easy, it makes sense, but I really can’t reach that conclusion yet. Maybe it’s my pacifism that’s making this block inside my brain, or maybe it’s fear. It could be half-repressed embarrassment at how vulnerable I really am at times…or it couldn’t be any of those. I’m not sure. The main thing is that it makes sense to the people who care about me, and they’re some of the sanest people I know. It makes sense to them, so I do it, if it’ll make them feel better. The world has too much worry…they don’t need to worry more. You don’t have to worry more.

That little revelation is one of the saddest and truest things that I have felt lately...people shouldn’t be worried but they are. They shouldn’t do bad things, but they do. Why?

Another note: chaos. I’ve been thinking about chaos and order lately—some of you know why, and please believe me when I say that I’m not worried; I’m not scared—and, like my old days in the basement, I turned to a book, and then turned inward for answers. What I’ve found is perhaps not the best explanation or the most logical one, but it’s what I’ve got for now. If you read this, it’s what you’ll have too, plus your own opinions of course.

What defines chaos? In the dictionary, chaos is “a state lacking order or predictability.” Order, it seems, is “a condition in which freedom from disorder or disruption is maintained through respect for established authority.” It can also be a command given by a general in a war, or a formal written letter stating requirements for commerce. Lastly, it can be a body of persons living under a religious discipline. This is interesting…can chaos be a religion all its own? It can be a god to those who wouldn’t have a god otherwise. Perhaps it can be everything to those who have lost everything…

Chaos, however, the idea of chaos, is by its nature indefinable. It’s unable to be measured or predicted. It’s a variable, endless and vulnerable, infinite and already dead. Living by chaos can be living, or it cannot be. You never know, and that’s the problem with it.
If you expect chaos, it will not be there, because it’s chaos, and it can’t be predicted. Yet at the same time it’s predictable in that respect. There’s no order to it, nothing that you can hang a resolve on or base one’s life around. It’s CHAOS—what we truly think of it is nothing but a shallow hint of what it really is. Perhaps a madman can truly tell us that it’s like, but it would be in a language we cannot understand. Come to think of it…that would be why he would be called a madman. That’s the danger of it; those who worship chaos might someday look at their altars and find that their god is dead, or not the god they were worshipping. Either that, or they look back from the altar to the world and see that what they are surrounded by is something they can no longer understand.