The overture of 12 rules for life by Jordan B. Peterson tells us about the origin story that led the author to write this book. Jordan B. Peterson was a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a clinical psychologist among other things. In summary, after a sixty or so rules list answer of his on the website Quora got a very big amount of likes and comments to the question “what are the most valuable things everyone should know?” Jordan suggested to his literary agent who he was in contact a few months earlier about writing a book that he would write a book proposal with a brief chapter on each of the rules on the previously mentioned list.
In this book overture, the author also introduces us to the chaos of life and his counterpart order which the next 12 rules will help us navigate between.
“Order is where people around you act according to well understood social norms and remain predictable and cooperative… chaos, by contrast, is where — or when — something unexpected happens, chaos emerges, in trivial form, when you tell a joke at a party with people you think you know and silent and embarrassing chill falls over the gathering, chaos is what emerges more catastrophically when you suddenly find yourself without employment or are betrayed by a lover…”
Overture, Page- xxxviii
When first I heard about this book I thought to my self “An antidote to chaos? sounds a bit dramatic, and what is chaos in a persons life? and if there is such a thing, is there an antidote to it as the book suggested?” after reading the previous paragraph in the book I realized how much chaos is there in my day to day life, how much I hate it but it is apart of our life and how I would very much like to avoid it as much a possible or have a cure for it when it arrives or even better an antidote.
Another paragraph that resonated with me is the one in which the author refers to the yin and yang, a Taoist symbol.
“Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents. head to tail. Order is the whit… chaos it's black. The black dot in the whit and the whit in the black indicate the possibility of transformations: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, a new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos” Overture, Page- xxviii
The reason this paragraph resonated with me is that in my own life I felt numerous times my life going from great (order) to terrible (chaos) back and forth and this paragraph helped me to give this phenomenon a face or some structure. I think by looking at the state of life by this analogy we can prepare for chaos when we are in order and look for a new order when we are in chaos.
