Why Is The Order a Source of Happiness?
I love order.
No, please, don’t confuse the love of order with fussiness. It’s not.
Think of something beautiful for you.
I bet that, whatever it is, the beauty you see has to do with symmetry.
And symmetry with coherence.
And coherence with an identity that you can recognize and that reflects yourself.
Symmetry and coherence
Symmetry and coherence are the pillars of order, especially regarding communication.
What do I mean by symmetry in communication? The speaker (or writer) and the listener (or reader) both have the same goal: to understand each other.
And what do I mean by coherence in communication? Those involved in the communication abide by some agreed rules, whatever they are, and don’t change their mind.
Beautiful communication shows symmetry and coherence: that’s a great example of the order I love.
You can find the beauty of order everywhere in the world — where the order gets respect — but communication is an excellent place for an order to show its beauty.
Communication and stories
As human beings, we all communicate, from waking up in the morning until it’s time to sleep at night.
That’s why I’d love to convince you that beauty, order, communication, and writing are the magic combination for some extra happiness.
Think of telling stories.
I’d say that, as human beings, we are stories.
That’s why we are constantly communicating: we communicate stories.
What’s the link between order and stories?
Stories need symmetry and coherence: the balance between the storyteller and their listeners and the coherence of the story’s characters.
Do you remember? Symmetry and coherence are the pillars of order. In some way, they are the order.
So the order is the seed of each story.
Order in time.
Order in cause-effect relationships.
Order among what is in and what is out.
Order by linking the dots, whatever they are.
Mixing all that, some stories like Pinocchio, or Otello, saw the light.
Do you begin to realize how beautiful and creative is order? Or are you among whom that see the order as an enemy and an annoying limitation?
Indeed, the dreaming mode is the enemy
The order has its enemies. I’d say that order mainly has just one enemy: the dreaming mode.
When you dream, you are the God of the laws of the universe that you’re craving. That means you can link the dots in whatever way you want and that you’ll always be right because you decide the rules that define right and wrong.
Note: in the concise paragraph above, I wrote six times you, and that’s a lot! These six you well reflect what the dreaming mode is. It’s when you’re the measure of everything when you’re the only one, so there is no possible symmetry between who looks at the beauty and the beauty itself. That sort of collapse is the main enemy of the order.
Asymmetry is a correspondence between different things that show enough coherence to reveal an identity amid diversity.
The dreaming mode kills any symmetry; then it kills the possibility of coherence amid the diversity (there’s only you).
The dreaming mode kills the possibility of telling a story because, without coherence, there’s no character. With no character, there’s no story.
By killing the story (try the impossible task of jotting a dream down as a story without adjusting it), the dreaming mode kills the order.
That’s the enemy.
But that’s too much!
Yeah, the previous paragraph was too much complicated!
That complication is an excellent example of why order and beauty are intuitively so distant from each other. It seems that the order does not, and can not, include gut feelings. On the other hand, it’s so easy to connect beauty with the gut and emotions.
But that’s the door to accessing the beauty of order: order is indeed the gut feelings becoming awareness.
Order is awareness
We eventually reach the crucial point about why you should love order too.
Thanks to the order, you can say things, say something, and draw things!
Thanks to the order, you can perceive yourself outside yourself, even representing those gut feelings that, otherwise, would remain underground.
Sure, that awareness is not easy, as it requires faith in something else existing beyond ourselves, which is definitely against our ego.
Our ego is the actual enemy of the order. Because the ego wants to be the rule, it doesn’t willingly accept any external authority.
The ego tends to collapse us into ourselves, aimed to be the absolute power of the lonely man, ruling, in the end, over nothing.
The awareness of being not alone, of being a connection: that’s what the order brings to the table of life.
And awareness is beauty
I love to think of beauty as the absence of all absence.
Every beauty is peace since it’s made up of a perfect balance. Beauty is where everything, whatever it is, exists in the right proportion amid other things.
That absence of all absence is the awareness: sometimes, out of the blue, it happens, and some order always shows up.
That’s the happiness that springs from beauty, that starts from awareness, that springs from order.
Nearing the end, the happiness
I started writing this article stating that I love order.
After some words, I promised to convince you that order deserves love, but at the end of this writing journey, it’s me who gains more awareness of my love of order. That’s the magic of seeking order!
I know that the love of order somehow suffers from the curse of knowledge. So, I don’t expect you to start loving order just because I’ve written all that down. It’s enough for me if, somewhere in your mind, a little door is now opening towards the doubt that order might be a great source of happiness.