I haven't written in nearly a year. I'm starting to slow down again in order to build a new kind of momentum. It feels good. I'm seeing the world in a new way, and I can feel something significant building around me. I just read [an article](https://blog.nateliason.com/p/what-if-you-have-it-backwards) by Nat Eliason that began to put into words a lifestyle that I have been leaning into more and more over the last year. I believe that good energy creates good experiences and good experiences create good energy. Some people think of energy as something you have a finite amount of in any given day, often based on how much you eat and sleep. There is no doubt that eating and sleeping play a significant role in how much energy you have, but I believe there's much more to it than that. I've been boxing for the last six months, and at the end of one or my workouts ~ a month ago I felt exhilarated. It was one of the best workout I've ever had and I was brimming with energy at the end of it. My body was utterly exhausted, but the endorphins were flying high. I got home, put on my running shoes, and shot out the door. I made it two blocks before my body started screaming again. This contrast between an exhausted body and an exhilarated mind is exactly what I mean when I talk about energy. I can be physically tired, but mentally and physiologically energetic at the exact same time. That physiological state is something that I have started to crave and I am optimizing my life around it. I feel this way when I have a workout where I push myself past the point I thought I could go, when I'm having fun around great people, when I'm doing creative work and come up with a new interesting idea, when I make a personal breakthrough that changes my perspective on life, when I come down from an adrenaline rush while sailing or boxing, or when I'm having a great day with my partner. Most of these things require an enormous amount of physical or mental energy to engage in, but afterwards I feel even more alive than I did before. I may be exhausted and need some down time, but in a few hours or the next day I'm ready to rock and roll and do it all over again. When I read Nat Eliaason's article, I began to put this part of my mentality into a more concrete form than I've been able to describe in the past. I often use the word "chaotic" to describe my life. Some people translate this as "spontaneous", others translate it as "disordered", but neither of those are quite right. The word *chaotic* is the right word. Nat uses the same word in the same way, and when that happens you know you're on a similar path and it's worth paying attention. Here are the two paragraphs about chaos that resonate with me: > [Our] intuition is that we need to create some degree of order before we add chaos. But perhaps adding chaos is what generates the motivation we need to create order. Each of us has a baseline level of chaos we're willing to tolerate, and we're only driven to make a change once that level of chaos is exceeded. Efforts to reduce the chaos below that level are often procrastinated because we aren't truly motivated by them. > Our intuition seems to prefer the immediate and the easy. The urgent but maybe not important. So we should ask ourselves: what if our intuition has it backwards. What if the problem is the solution? And what if we need more chaos to create order? It might provide the clarity we need. I live my life chaotically insofar as I will stop what I'm doing at the drop of a hat to do something that will give me energy or that will make me feel alive. But that chaos is purposeful and intentional, and it's the chaos that takes the front and center stage in my life. My life isn't chaotic because I will drop what I'm doing for something energizing, my life is energizing because I choose chaos over order. It's a lifestyle choice that I have found to be extremely rewarding. Nat touches on this mentality throughout his post. His main message is, *what if we have it backward? what if our intuition's cause->effect estimations are mixing which one is the cause and which one is the effect?*. I notice this "backwards" mentality constantly in the things I do. One of my favorite sayings is *smile and you will be happy*. I learned that forcing a smile and relaxing into that smile makes me happy. Everyone smiles when they are happy, but the idea that smiling makes me happy constantly surprises me. I'm a scientist at heart, and at the heart of all good science is something unexpected. "Smile and you will be happy" is unexpected. I treat this saying as an unexpected data point, and when I find an unexpected data point I start looking for other similar data points. So what else around me confirms or denies this idea? How can it be generalized into something that applies not just to smiling, but to other facets of my life? Deliberate scarcity is another example. In the 90's and 00's the American mentality was that more is always better. In the last 10 or so years we have slowly been erasing that mentality. I practice deliberate scarcity where I purposefully do not buy things or purposefully go without something I want. I do this for a few reasons: first I did it because I wanted to be more of a minimalist; then I did it because I realized my attention is my most valuable resource and that everything I own requires my attention; now I am beginning to do it to motivate myself to do the things I care most about doing in my life. Without deliberate scarcity I could be very very content. I could buy the things I want to buy, probably go on the vacations I want to go on. And sometimes I do. But not every day. I don't want to get into a mode where everything I want is available at my fingertips, where comfort is an inch away. I know that mindset will be debilitating. Sometimes I sleep in the morning on a 1" yoga mat with a blanket on top. It's hard and uncomfortable, but I usually sleep like a rock. And when I get up, I feel great. There is a physiological change that happens in those few hours of early morning sleep on a yoga mat and I simply don't understand what's going on. But I can feel the difference and I trust it. This idea is at the heart of Nat's post. It is littered with thoughts about flipping our perspective and expectations about what makes us happy. So his post is another data point - in addition to the data points *smile and you will be happy* and *deliberate scarcity motivates your life*. I'm taking the lesson to be this: *chaos promotes invigorating energy*. When I reread that sentence, I nearly scoff. It's so counter intuitive that I almost reject it outright. But I live it and I feel it every day. *Chaos promotes invigorating energy*. How spectacularly unexpected is that? So now I know: I feel alive when I embrace a chaotic life, I'm motivated to change the world around me when I deliberately prevent contentment, and I am happy when I smile. We live in a magical world.