Our clients invite us to assist them using a logical, emotional and action-based story, made up inside the boundaries of what the client believes they know about their past, their dreams for the future and the powers, limits, possibilities and risks they presently imagine to be working for or against them.

The story is a construction of their mind, a thought piece, disconnected from direct experience, crafted to minimize needed change and maintain an uninterrupted flow of preferred pleasures of life. This is their cover story which justifies their life’s predicament.

To make this story hang together and remain limited to their knowing, it has logical disconnects throughout, missing chapters, twists in the interpretation of past events to make them fit, questionable assumptions about other people’s motives and a world view which may be pretty dodgy.

I call this story their ‘Mess’ - a muddle of forces and assumptions and happenings - at the fences or well inside the territories of chaos.  

An upbeat, optimistic version of their Mess may describe a grand adventure - a challenging, invigorating mountain or two to be climbed. An encouraging mess seeks strategies for the highest accomplishment.

A down, discouraging Mess likely holds failure, unsustainable living or working, the loss of a loved one, overwhelming disruption, or a nasty turn of fortune. This discouraging Mess begs for answers to reduce the pain.

That said, the Mess is almost never as clearly drawn as upbeat or down. It is a jumble of both.

Acting on these narratives as told is an attempt at fixing the story with the same material - inside the bounds of what we know we know - which made the story unworkable to start with. Fixing continues an illusion of control and predictability inherent in the construction of the personal Mess in the first place - a rational story crafted to keep the enduring and pervasive uncertainty of life out of our view and experience. Fixing disconnects much of what our insights bring to the conversation, erasing the opportunity to discover the more fundamental truths of our lives.

While their story is structured to minimise disruption and pain and keep pleasure in their lives, they are in our presence because their rationally justified Mess has run into inexplicable trouble. Something beyond the limits of their known world has pulled the rug out from under them. The upheavals are greater than their limited knowledge can handle. There are not answers within the boundaries of their knowns. Some larger chaos is afoot. Some broader Mess which is unseen, incognito, stirring the pot, making trouble, just as it also offers wider possibilities.

Such is the unfathomable universal natural Mess of which we are a living part. We are inseparable from it by any linguistic or symbolic trick played with our heads. Our made up personal cover story is what we use to split our mind in two. We attempt to live in the made up version so we don’t have to continually confront the uncertain upheavals of the moment to moment, fluid, dance of all things. This is necessary in the short term to get things done. But if we forget that we have made up this fiction and start believing it is true and sacrosanct, we make far more pain and suffering for ourselves than letting go of the story when its usefulness has run out.

The natural Mess is ever changing, moment to moment, beyond control or influence, beyond anything we can ever hope to actually understand. We can feel it at work. We can experience things coming our way through it and just as surely being taken away by it. It brings moments of immense clarity as surely as it raises unfathomable questions.

We each belong to the natural Mess as it belongs to us. We are deeply influenced by the moment to moment dance of all things. Deeply influenced in the dimensions of ourselves which lie outside of waking awareness. We rarely if ever see them directly. We see their effect on our daily lives. And we make up stories to explain what is going on, to keep ourselves separate from disruptions. Try as we might, we cannot really separate from our life in the Mess. The huge array of our being, stretching beyond the wee, waking, thinking, consciousness we refer to as "I", is in the dance all the time. And all the time it has is the present moment. In the big Mess, there is no past and no future - those are mental constructs our conscious mind uses for our convenience.

When we split off our "I" from the all encompassing "Me", we set up a conflict within. Our Me, our whole body mind is in the ever-changing dance. Our "I" denies the dance in favour of predictability and control, which sets us against ourselves. When the changes come with so much upheaval and disruption that our "I" can no longer maintain the illusion of stability, the logical story fails and we are thrown back into that which we tried to deny, the Mess, where our lives are constantly changing and constantly uncertain.

The Mess is uncertainty at its finest. Our Mess is really big.