I used to worship chaos. Behind it lay a rebellious desire to be “free”: for me, disorder was synonymous with aliveness and an untamed spirit. For a long time, structure, fixed times, and rules felt to me like a prison that robs you of spontaneity and room to breathe.
Yet chaos makes you unfree.
It took years for me to truly grasp that for myself. And honestly, this slow transition from chaos to order is still not simply finished today. I have to prove to myself over and over again that structure takes nothing away from me, but on the contrary truly does me good.
The easiest way for me to understand this is when I look at a soccer pitch.
In soccer, the rules and basic formation are not there to spoil the players’ fun. They make a good game possible in the first place — both for a better “we” within your own team and for an honest, fair “against each other.”
Without boundary lines, offside, and clear foul rules, there is no real duel, just wild hacking. And without a basic formation within your own team, all eleven players chase the ball at the same time, get in each other’s way, and are completely exhausted after twenty minutes.
Of course, you can overdo it in the other direction too: if a coach on the sideline dictates every single run as if on a drawing board, he kills the game. A good match is allowed to get wild and gritty at times — it does not need a corset, it needs a guardrail everyone can rely on so there is room in between for real surprises.
That is the exact point for me in my own life today.
I have no intention of becoming tame or conformist. But I learned the hard way: when I live completely without a handrail and give free rein to chaos, what wins in the end is not freedom, but the loudest impulse in my head. You burn through your strength flying blind and stand in your own way.
Conversely, everything inside me rebels the moment I try to clock my life like a timecard. I am not a person made for rigid timetables.
My guardrails today are therefore simple and rough-hewn: I make sure my sleep has its place and that I do not lose myself in front of the screen or inside my own head. Often, it doesn’t need to be much more than that.
It is no smooth victory, but a daily wrestling match in which I still slip across the line from time to time. Yet every time the framework holds, I feel the difference: the fire does not go out — it finally gets a direction. My mind is more awake, more conscious, and suddenly much more attentive to the moment and the people in front of me.
By René Jochum - LLM Translated. License: CC-BY-4.0.