Yes! A close friend told me a few years ago: "life is chaos". At the time I didn't understand how this shed any insight. My immediate reaction was to think: "bu

Yes! A close friend told me a few years ago: "life is chaos". At the time I didn't understand how this shed any insight. My immediate reaction was to think: "but life is a mixture of order and disorder – is not your statement obviously false?" A year later it hit me. Perhaps this is not what she meant, but I formulated it for myself as follows: "The universe has absolutely no compulsion to be orderly or just." Your life will be a mess. The world will be incredibly unjust. Billions do and will suffer. You are helpless to affect this in any meaningful way. Your task is to learn to cope with all this and find path to inner serenity. -- Reading Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching helped form some structure around this idea for me by fitting it into a framework for positive action and providing a number of helpful mantras: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/taote...