Finding Peace in a World of Chaos

You aren’t alone in the pain of life. But healing works.

William Anderson, LMHC
7 min readFeb 10, 2024
Image by pixabay.com

There was a saying that was popular some years ago, “Life’s a bitch, and then you die”. Is that true? Certainly, it is for some. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Many believe the Buddha said, “Life is suffering”, though I’m sure he did not speak English. What are we to make of these depressing perceptions of life? Are they true?

M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, understood that the Buddha’s Noble Truths did not say that life is suffering, but that suffering exists. The Buddha also proposed a solution.

Is it true that endless desperation and suffering is our destiny? Is life a bitch? At times pain and suffering certainly exist, but solutions exist. Life is not just suffering. Life is about healing and transcending the suffering.

Study the picture below of the aftermath of a snowstorm in the city, the silence in the early morning that’s almost deafening. Imagine the whole world quieted with a muffling blanket of snow, absent of any sound other than the crunch of your feet on the new fallen snow.

Remember lying in the grass as a kid with no one around, staring up at the clouds floating by. When have you last done that? Do you remember the peace it brought? You may have experienced a peace that can’t be had nor understood in the world of ceaseless noise we have created and live in. If you haven’t, you need to try it now.

We know that we live in a world of chaos and disorder. That’s a fact. Our smartphones constantly bombard us with beeps, buzzes, and alerts. And TV news reminds us every day of the wars, suffering and evil threatening to overcome our world. How do we live in the midst of this without being filled with that chaos and suffering, sick and depressed and getting worse?

It wasn’t that long ago, only 200 years, in our 200,000 years on earth, we lived in a world without electronics and mechanized travel. No TV, no radio, no telephones. Our lives 200 years ago were more like that of 200,000 years ago than they are today. When there were wars and disasters hundreds of miles away, we only heard about them days or weeks later. We only heard about conflicts overseas months after they occurred, in the time it took horses and ships to traverse the continents. Back then, the huge majority of us lived in rural and agricultural communities and spent most of our day in an environment similar to those moments in the snow and fields. We communed with nature, immersed in the spirit and quiet of nature’s creation, not the noise, chaos and confusion of mankind. We spent millions of years evolving to survive and succeed in that existence, and we were created by nature and evolution to live in that world, not the world we live in today. Many of us never have any relief from the noise and call of the world, even when we sleep. If the phones are on, or worse, set to ring, something in us is always listening attentively, not lost in that peace beyond understanding.

Can you find peace, even though you live in a world of chaos? Yes. Yes, if you seek it. It is not effortless. You must take action. It is not difficult work, but it can be difficult to do. The world, the phone, the TV, the toxic people of chaos, everything that delivers you the chaos, will beckon and tempt you. To experience peace, you must leave it, if only for a few moments.

Before you are able to leave it at will for moments at a time whenever you want, you must train your mind. You may be stuck in the chaos if you have not trained your mind to turn it off. How to train your mind? The main thing is to find a way to turn off the chaos and actually experience the peace. Some people think that taking a course with a Yogi or paying a mediation teacher is the way. Perhaps. That can be beneficial. But however you seek it, there is no teacher better than experience. You may have to go away to the quiet, like the wilderness, for a while, to lay in the grass and just study the clouds. Or the beach or the mountaintop. Or a rooftop with nothing but the sky above you. There is a magic in immersing yourself in nature and becoming one with it. There is no explaining it. It must be experienced to know it. You may have to go on an organized retreat that you must book in your calendar so you don’t procrastinate and keep putting it off. But once you actually immerse yourself and lose yourself in the clouds, you’ll have something you can recall and re-experience if you make a habit of breaking off from the world and going there.

We need healing in this world of chaos. Earlier, I referred to making ourselves sick with our immersion in the world of chaos and noise. We filled ourselves with it and it makes us sick, body, mind and soul. The stress and behaviors we developed to cope have given us physical diseases. The stress and noise, suffering, hate and anger have given us mental disorders like depression, anxiety, panic disorders, suicidality and even homocidal behavior. The constant exposure to hate, violence, ill will and evil has brought spiritual disease, filling our souls with it so we have lost touch with anything spiritually healthy and good.

Many of the world’s spiritual traditions refer to a time that we lived in harmony with nature, one with nature and the energy or spirit that generates it, that gives it life and being. But at some point, we became separated, lost the connection to it, not one with it anymore. And with that belief in separateness, came the suffering. They say that we need healing, to become one with it again, to heal the separateness, to reconnect with it, to live in harmony with it rather than fighting to be separate, our own little god, apart from nature and the energy that it is.

Religions are supposed to help us reconnect. The word itself comes from the Latin religare, to re-bind, re-ligare. Ligare means to bind, related to ligament, which holds the body together. Religion was supposed to reconnect us and help us be one with that which we separated from. I don’t know if religions really succeed at that.

When people leave the chaos and noise, when they leave the phone, the TV and the toxic chatter, and they go to the field or mountaintop or sea and stare at the clouds and stars or ocean, they often become aware that they are a part of nature. They may have to lay quiet for a while and listen to the sea or the wind in the trees and the birds. They need to get lost in it, experience being a part of it. When you become conscious of the reality that you are a part of this whole, that the energy that courses through you is the same energy that courses through nature, you may start to experience your connection to it. Your connection to it, your one-ness with it is the healing the holy people talk about.

Our people have made the Earth a world of chaos and noise, and it’s easy to be consumed by it, to get lost in it, a world of suffering. But even while we walk through it, there is another world, nature and its life and spirit, that we can recall and connect with. It can give us peace and healing if we stop the world of chaos for a moment and invite our true nature in, become one with it, become whole. But we have to connect with it on a regular basis. We can do it in our mind anywhere, in the car, in the bathroom, anywhere, if we recall the reality of the nature and energy we are made of. We can make it a habit in our mind so that the connection even becomes continuous.

We are challenged to be in the world of chaos and noise, but be one with another realm, that which creates the peace and beauty of the fields and mountains. We can do that just by remembering it, when we have done the work to connect with it again.

Make a date to go to the beach, or a park, a field or a mountain, and lose yourself in the clouds and the sounds of nature. Leave your devices behind. Have a picnic. See what happens. Keep doing it on a regular basis until you become a part of the peace and quiet of nature instead of a part of the chaos and noise. Keep practicing recreating that scene and experience in your mind on a regular basis until that connection becomes continuous.

That’s the healing, the wholeness, we really need.

William Anderson is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, the author of “The Anderson Method of Permanent Weight Loss” (paperback and Kindle at Amazon, audiobook at Audible). He was obese until his early thirties when he found the solution. He lost 140 pounds, has kept it off for over 35 years. and has taught thousands to successfully manage their weight as one of his specialties in his psychotherapy practice. Now semi-retired, he has turned his attention to social activism as well as mental health activism, promoting the health and well-being of the community as well as the individual, body, mind and spirit.

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William Anderson, LMHC
William Anderson, LMHC

Written by William Anderson, LMHC

Psychotherapist teaching the psychology and science of weight control. Author of "The Anderson Method — The Secret to Permanent Weight Loss".

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