I read a good article recently in the October, 2005 issue of Harper's Magazine. The article is by Rebecca Solnit and it's titled, "The Uses of Disaster: Notes on Bad Weather and Good Government." In it, she talks about how the kind of disruption in our lives that comes from a natural or man-made disaster, can actually be a positive force, drawing people out of their routine lives and making them concentrate on things outside of themselves.

I particularly liked this passage:

But around the periphery of many diasasters is a far larger population of people who are unhurt but deeply disrupted. Often enough, many of those people find the disruption deeply satisfying as well as unnerving. They enjoy the disruption not only of the barriers that normally separate them from their neighbors but also of their own grinding self-absorption. Such disruption can provide a satisfaction so profound it transcends even the fear and sadness of diasaster's devastation. For disasters experienced as trauma make people feel helpless, but this awakened civil society instead often makes them feel powerful and free.

I think Solnit touches on something we don't often consider: Maybe what we really want in life, what we really need every now and again, is disruption. It seems counterintuitive. I know I spend a good part of each day trying to establish order to things. I like to reason that once order is established, once I am 'less busy' and things are 'less chaotic,' that I will do the things I've been meaning to do. But it usually doesn't really unfold this way. I'm never less busy. And, in fact, most of the meaningful things I've accomplished in my life have come at a time of stress, when things were in flux.

It makes sense: If we feel comfortable and safe, then the instinct is to remain that way. Do nothing. The order is alluring. We stay the course. We tend to resist change. But then there is sameness which leads to boredom, and eventually becomes discontent. Which leads back to the longing for disruption in one form or another.

When there is disruption, we're compelled to get up and do something about it. The disruption can come from outside or we can bring it upon ourselves. In either case, it compels us to act in some manner different then we had acted before. It may bring us out of ourselves, make us think in new ways, burn new synaptic pathways through our brains. It may lead to creative thought, to problem solving, getting our minds out of whatever endless loop it is on. A great disruption can help people put aside all the constructed barriers, self-imposed or otherwise, and let them truly focus on the situation at hand.

With the possible exception of news media, nobody actually wakes up in the morning and hopes to have something truly disastrous occur - a flood, an earthquake. But I think people do long for disruption on a more 'micro' scale: The office worker who secretely hopes that today will be the day he gets fired from his mind-numbing job, if for no other reason than it will get him off his ass to look for a new one. The abused spouse or friend who sabatoges her marriage or friendship as a way to escape a relationship dynamic that has become caustic. It hurts to fall out of the familiar pattern. But when we do, it opens up a new range of possibility.

Seems fitting to end on this quote from Fight Club: It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.

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