Rational Chaoticism

At the centre of Rational Chaoticism lies a fundamental truth: art must come with meaning. Without it, it becomes a hollow exercise, a way to pass the time - an empty aesthetic divorced from any deeper understanding. Some will argue that all visual compositions inherently carry significance, and in a way they do, but that idea has been commodified and manipulated by those who seek to profit from ambiguity, veiling nothingness behind a facade of intellectual profundity.

The art world is rife with critics and gallerists who spin elaborate interpretations to elevate the arbitrary, not as a means of genuine artistic exploration, but as a marketing strategy designed to inflate value. This distortion dilutes the very essence of artistic expression, reducing it to a game of perception rather than a way of actually communicating something. It creates a culture where rigour is no longer expected, where the story around a work matters more than the effort in it, and where mediocrity can hide behind clever wording. Artists are free to lower their standards under the guise of conceptual depth, and get rewarded with acclaim far out of proportion to what they’ve put in.

In this environment it becomes not only acceptable but celebrated to spend mere hours, sometimes even minutes, on a piece of art and sell it at exorbitant prices, so long as the explanation that comes with it is obscure or provocative enough. The result is a market saturated with art that is technically shallow and emotionally vacant - works that gesture toward meaning without ever really engaging with it.

Over the last few decades this trend has corroded the public’s view of art itself. It lowers our collective expectations and slowly drains the culture of work that genuinely moves, challenges, and inspires. When the bar drops and effort becomes optional, art stops telling us anything about being human and starts telling us only about money, fashion, and fame.

That’s why meaning is the anchor that grounds creativity. To dismiss it is to deny the very essence of art. But meaning doesn’t arise from a single brushstroke, a solitary colour, or an isolated form. It can’t be forced into every mark, nor does it need to be. Meaning is cultivated through the process - the hours spent in creation, the evolution of an idea over time, and the lifetime of the artwork itself, both while it’s being made and once it leaves the artist’s hands. It lives in the silent negotiations between the artist and their medium.

In contemporary art circles there’s an unfortunate trend: a relentless rush to produce, driven not by creativity but by the endless demands of curators and social media algorithms. Artists, pressured to stay visible and relevant in a saturated digital landscape, end up prioritising quantity over quality. The result is a flood of imagery that might dazzle the eye for a second but leaves the soul untouched. These works trade depth and intention for immediacy, catering to the short attention spans of an audience drowning in endless scrolling. They lack the richness and complexity of the art of times past, when every brushstroke or chisel mark carried real contemplation and intent, and offered layers of meaning for viewers to unravel over time.

Now don’t get me wrong, many of these modern pieces are visually stunning. They look great on walls and in galleries. They use colour, form, and composition in ways that can be genuinely beautiful, and may even trigger a sense of harmony or a moment of the sublime. But more often than not, they fall short of art’s higher purpose. True art, dare I say it, is not just decorative. It’s a conversation across time, space and place, a story with layers, a labyrinth you’re invited to get lost in. It resonates with viewers on more than one level - it makes them think, it stirs something, and sometimes it even changes them. Without meaning, without that essential convo between the creator, the work, and the observer, art is just a surface. It may ‘wow’ for a moment, but it won’t endure, and it can’t truly connect.

There’s often a quiet pressure on artists to explain themselves, to justify why their work deserves to exist. Most creators eventually face that internal interrogation: Why am I making this? And later, the external one: Why should anyone else care?

We force ourselves to present a clear intention or concept before a mark is even made. But that isn’t what’s important. What’s important is the process itself, because the process is where the work actually becomes itself - shaped by decisions, mistakes, and discoveries that no concept can predict. It’s where meaning builds up, where the piece grows beyond its starting point into something neither planned nor accidental. A work doesn’t gain significance at its conception, but through the experiences and transformations it goes through along the way - just like a human life, which unfolds in unexpected ways and gathers depth with every decision, adjustment, and realisation.

The lifespan of an artwork shouldn’t necessarily begin with an idea - it should always begin with action. A blank canvas, a lump of clay, an instrument lying on the table - each holds an infinite amount of potential. But that potential means nothing until the first stroke, the first squish in your hands, or the first strum of the strings. That first moment isn’t about executing some premeditated vision; it’s about stepping into the unknown and letting the work take on a life of its own. Each decision, deliberate or instinctive, builds on the last, shaping something that could never have been fully predicted at the start. The piece evolves through reaction, adjustment, and discovery. And when the final mark is made, when the artist steps back, looks at what they’ve made and decides - often reluctantly - that it’s finished, its lifespan ends. But its legacy continues. It moves from process to permanence, from living to a slow decay, preserved for others to encounter, interpret, and respond to. In this way, every artwork lives two lives: the life of its making, and the still, silent presence of its completion.

I liken it to the life of a human. It begins the moment a blank canvas is placed on an easel or wall. This is its conception - a moment of pure potential, unshaped and full of possibility. The first act taken by its creator. Like a human life, an artwork doesn’t come into existence with any inherent meaning. At its conception it’s just a seed, a suggestion of what it might become. In the same way, a newborn’s life, though deeply cherished by its loved ones, isn’t yet defined by experience or purpose. A newborn’s legacy doesn’t exist outside its immediate circle, just as an empty canvas with a few marks on it holds no real meaning. What matters in both is their potential - nobody knows what their future holds. The work of art could become a generation-defining piece, the next Garden of Earthly Delights, just as the newborn could grow up to discover the key to clean, limitless energy or interstellar travel.

A work of art’s conception occurs when the artist gathers their materials and places the canvas on the easel. This is the act of creation, putting things in place to make something. This is the sex, this is the incubation. Unlike humans, who have an incubation period of around nine months, a work of art’s is usually very short - minutes, hours, or days. Rarely more.

The birth occurs with the first mark, the first step into the real world, where emptiness is transformed into substance. From there, the artwork lives out its lifetime, each stroke or addition like the moments and milestones of a person growing up. Perhaps the first sketch is its childhood, where forms begin to take shape. The first layer of colour is its adolescence, where those sketched forms start to be covered over but at the same time solidified. The detailed features - a glint in an eye, a thread on a garment, a leaf edge, a reflection on a droplet of water - tiny elements that add meaning or personality. These are its adulthood, where the true meaning is formed. Meaning in human life emerges gradually, shaped by the education we receive, the emotions we feel, and the struggles and victories we go through. It’s through years of growth and self-discovery that a person’s life comes together into a story with purpose and identity. Each mark on a canvas can be seen as a day, a week, or even a month in the artwork’s timeline - every one adding to the story. It grows in complexity and form, developing its own voice and character with every decision the artist makes.

When the final stroke is laid - usually the artist’s name or initials in the bottom right-hand corner - and the piece is deemed complete, this marks its death: the end of its active creation. The act of preservation, whether through varnishing, framing, or any other means, becomes its embalming, preparing it for its afterlife as it leaves the studio and enters the world to be experienced and interpreted by others. Its frame acts as its coffin, and the wall it’s hung on becomes its final resting place. It’s in this resting place, the wall of its burial plot, where the legacy of a painting - and of a human - lives on for generations to come. How great and meaningful a person’s life was dictates how far into the future they’re remembered. The same goes for a piece of art.

This parallel reveals a simple truth: both are journeys of discovery, where meaning isn’t handed down at the outset but built up through time, effort, and reflection. Just as a human life’s value is shaped by the living of it, the meaning of art is born from the making of it.

True art never comes from a single mental state. It’s born from the constant negotiation between the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious minds - three realities that don’t quite line up with one another, but push and pull at each other in ways we barely ever notice. Together they make up the architecture of our inner world, shaping how we see, how we choose, and how we interpret the chaos of living these crazy lives. To understand this is to understand not only creativity, but something about what it means to be human.

The unconscious is the deep, unlit territory where instinct, memory, and dreams coil around each other. It’s where the first sparks of creation live, long before we can name them. Ideas rise up from here without warning, carrying a strange clarity that defies logic. And as Haruki Murakami suggests through the Shadow in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, this hidden part of us isn’t optional but essential: “I am your Shadow. Without me, you will lose your memory, your self. You will be nothing.”

The conscious mind, by contrast, is the builder. It gives shape, structure, and coherence. It’s the part of us that edits, questions, and refines - the part that insists on making sense of what first arrived as raw sensation. If the unconscious throws sparks up from the dark, the conscious mind is the hand that tends them, deciding which to feed and which to let burn out. It’s where deliberate choice, language, and interpretation happen, where we try to translate the strange, instinctive stuff rising from below into something we can live with. But even as it builds, it’s always working with borrowed materials, shaping what it didn’t originate.

Between them lies the preconscious: the drifting threshold where impressions hover just before they surface. It’s the quiet corridor where half-formed thoughts gather, waiting to be recognised - the mind’s twilight zone, not fully dark but not lit either. It’s where memories brush against awareness and slip away again, where intuition starts to take shape long before we can say why something feels right. It’s the realm of subtle nudges, of déjà vu, of the strange sense that an idea has been circling us for a long time before we finally catch it. It’s where our shadows are barely visible.

In the act of creating, these three states move through us constantly. An idea might begin as a flicker in the unconscious - a feeling, an image, a memory that won’t stay buried. The preconscious carries it upward, letting it take on edges and hints of something that could one day mean something.

Then the conscious mind steps in and shapes it into something tangible. But the process is never linear. It loops back on itself. It stalls, erupts, and dissolves. Moments of clarity appear and vanish, only to come back in a different form. To create is to move through these states with a kind of flexibility - not clinging too tightly to control, but not surrendering completely to impulse either.

And this isn’t limited to art. In everyday life, the same back-and-forth between the three states governs how we understand the world. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings making deliberate choices, but most of what we do has already been shaped by unconscious drivers and preconscious impressions long before we can put a reason to it. We never experience reality directly; it’s filtered through these layers of awareness and reconstructed moment by moment. Recognising this means accepting that real creativity, and real engagement with life, takes more than intellect or instinct alone. It means being willing to live in the spaces in between, trusting the unseen forces that shape our thinking, and accepting that meaning is fluid - it comes out of the collision of these three realms rather than from any one of them.

When we work from this place, art stops being just a picture of what’s in front of us, or of some chaotic moment within us. It becomes a way of uncovering what we didn’t even know we knew.

Before we can explore how these states shape creativity, we need to understand their individual roles. None of them operates in isolation; they’re part of a larger, living system, much like the relationship between rationality and chaos. Together they determine how we think, how we create, and how we interpret the world. By looking at each one separately, we can see what it contributes to the creative act.

In the pages ahead, we’ll move through these three realms, guided in part by Freud’s ideas, as a way of understanding the interplay between intention and intuition. Along the way, we’ll see how creativity comes not from order or chaos alone, but from the tension between them - the tension at the heart of Rational Chaoticism.

There’s a particular quality to great art. It can’t really be defined, but when you see it you just know. Great art doesn’t sit in a room waiting to be admired. It reaches out and grabs us. It pulls us in until our faces are centimetres apart, and before we even understand what’s happening we’re staring into each other’s eyes. A great painting glimpsed from across a gallery draws us over; a song overheard in passing follows us home; an idea in a novel stays with us long after we’ve closed the book. Something has attached itself to us. This is one of the great mysteries of art. Why do some works stay with us while thousands of others are forgotten almost instantly? Why does one image haunt someone for decades while another is gone before they’ve left the room? Technical mastery alone can’t explain it. History is full of impeccably executed works that have vanished into obscurity, while other pieces - sometimes rough, imperfect, or just plain strange - keep pulling in each new generation that comes across them.

Maybe great art works less like an object and more like a field of energy. We don’t just look at it; we enter into a relationship with it. It starts with attraction, but attraction is only the surface. What keeps us coming back is the feeling that there’s always something more underneath, that the work never quite lets us have all of it at once. Like a magnet, great art draws us closer. But unlike a magnet, whose pull is spent once contact is made, art often gets stronger the closer you get. Up close it gets more complicated: details emerge, contradictions show up, and the questions start to outnumber the answers. What seemed simple from a distance turns out to have hidden depths, and the work starts to unfold rather than explain itself.

It’s within this unfolding that an image, song, sculpture, or story becomes memorable. Art that gives everything away at once rarely survives a second look; it’s consumed, understood, and used up too quickly. The works that last hold something back. They stay partly unresolved and leave something unfinished in us. In many ways, this is where Rational Chaoticism begins. Humans are meaning-making creatures. We’re uncomfortable with uncertainty, so when we’re faced with ambiguity we instinctively look for explanations, patterns, and stories. With that in mind, it makes sense that the most engaging works of art refuse to give us complete closure. They sit somewhere between revealing and hiding, showing enough to invite us in but holding back enough to keep us searching, so that every time we go back we find something new. This is why engagement can’t be reduced to aesthetics. A beautiful painting might catch our attention, but attention isn’t the same as involvement. Engagement happens when the viewer becomes part of making the meaning. The artwork provides the framework, but the experience is completed in the mind of whoever is looking at it.

The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer described understanding as a ‘fusion of horizons’, a meeting between the world of the artwork and the world of the viewer. As he put it, “In a tradition this process of fusion is continually going on, for there old and new are always combining into something of living value.” Every encounter is unique. Two people can stand in front of the same painting and come away with entirely different works. The canvas hasn’t changed, but the meanings people take from it are endless. That isn’t a flaw in art; it’s probably its greatest strength. A work that allows only one interpretation eventually runs its course, while one that keeps generating new readings across generations stays alive and evolves alongside the culture that encounters it.

Think about how differently we understand ancient myths today compared to the societies that first told them. Or how a novel read at sixteen can feel completely different at twenty-five, and again at forty. The book hasn’t changed. We have. New experiences, achievements, losses, relationships, failures, and insights change the lens we read it through. In that sense, art behaves a lot like memory. A painting seen in childhood can disappear from your mind for decades and then come back out of nowhere later in life. A song can collapse years into seconds. A scent, a colour, a phrase, and suddenly the past is present again. Art holds fragments of ourselves. It keeps hold of emotional states that would otherwise get buried under the pile-up of daily life. That’s why great art often feels strangely personal, even when it shows experiences far removed from our own. We recognise something in it - not necessarily a literal memory, but a psychological truth. A question we’ve never been able to answer, or didn’t even know we needed to ask.

The best art doesn’t tell us what to think. It shows us something we already know but haven’t found the words for yet, and that can be unsettling. Real engagement isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes a work captures something we’d rather avoid - a suppressed grief, an unacknowledged desire, a contradiction we’ve spent years trying to ignore. Art can work like a mirror, but not an ordinary one. It doesn’t just reflect what’s on the surface; it reflects possibilities, absences, and the parts of ourselves we keep hidden.

This is one reason great art often feels alive. We get the sense it’s responding to us specifically. It asks us a question, we answer, and it asks another, and a conversation builds up over time. The physical side of this shouldn’t be underestimated either. We tend to talk about art as if it were purely intellectual, but our first responses are usually bodily. We feel a painting at first glance, before we’ve analysed anything. We react to rhythm, colour, texture, weight, and movement long before we start interpreting. A towering cathedral can fill you with awe before a single theological idea crosses your mind, and a piece of music can give you goosebumps without saying anything concrete at all. The body often knows something matters before the brain catches up.

So engagement happens on several levels at once. The conscious mind analyses, the unconscious makes associations, memory throws in its fragments, and the body adds sensation. Meaning comes out of all of these working on each other. It also explains why art can never be fully controlled once it’s out in the world. The artist might have meant one thing and the viewer sees something else. A great work can be misunderstood, reinterpreted, challenged, celebrated, rejected, rediscovered, or transformed by contexts its maker never could have imagined, and far from diminishing it, that openness is what keeps it going. So to engage a viewer isn’t to persuade them or hand them answers. It’s to make room for them to discover something - to build a bridge between what’s known and what’s still hidden.

The greatest works pull this off with incredible precision. They give us enough structure to find our footing and enough ambiguity to keep us exploring. They satisfy our need for meaning while keeping the mystery that makes meaning worth chasing in the first place. That’s why we keep going back to them, and why every visit turns up something new. In the most important sense, the work stays unfinished - not incomplete, but alive. It draws us in, it rewards attention, and it asks us to look again, and again, and once more. And somewhere in all that looking, it changes us. Or maybe, more accurately, it lets us notice how we’ve already changed ourselves.

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes - oh, and don’t forget change and growth. Regardless of who you are or what you do, the person you are today won’t be the same person in a year, and who you are in a year will be almost unrecognisable to who you are in a decade. There’s a quote by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” It speaks to the ever-changing nature of both us and the world around us. Just as a river’s current reshapes its course over time, experiences, challenges, and new perspectives keep reshaping who we are. Growth isn’t always linear or predictable - sometimes it’s a slow trickle, other times a deluge. But whether it comes as subtle shifts or life-changing upheavals, one thing’s for sure - change is inevitable. Accepting that lets us approach life, art, and creativity with openness, knowing that nothing is ever truly still.

This fluidity doesn’t come without its challenges, though. Throughout your life there will be setbacks - times when progress feels stalled, when obstacles seem insurmountable, and when failures test your resilience. These periods may force you to rethink your direction, change your approach, or even, as annoying as it is, start over. Yet you never really start over entirely, do you? You learn from your mistakes, and you evolve with each new step. And just as setbacks are inevitable, so are moments of triumph - opportunities that turn up when you least expect them, breakthroughs that change your path, and achievements that push you forward in ways you never could have predicted.

Both the highs and the lows shape your journey, and both affect not only your personal growth but the depth and honesty of your work. The struggles you go through can add layers of meaning to what you make, while moments of success can remind you why you’re doing it.

So rather than resisting these ups and downs, embrace them. Let adversity sharpen your vision rather than put you off, and treat success as a stepping stone, not a finish line. Letting both the setbacks and the wins shape you gives you a richer, more nuanced perspective, and that feeds straight back into your life and your work. Too often, artists find a style they like, or one that sells, and stick with it for the rest of their lives. It’s crucial to stay malleable - to let your changing circumstances shape you, to let your current emotions into your work, and to let your unconscious thoughts keep transforming your art.

Within the framework of Rational Chaoticism, who you are today isn’t fixed. It’s a construct, a shifting algorithm of influences and experiences. Your mind works a bit like a computer program, shaped by the inputs of your upbringing, education, social circles, culture, and personal choices. These outside forces have programmed how you perceive reality, often creating patterns that feel rigid or predetermined.

If your current state feels restrictive - if you’re stuck in cycles of comparison, weighed down by feeling inadequate, or paralysed by self-doubt - that isn’t a reflection of your worth or ability. It’s a sign that the internal framework guiding your thoughts has become distorted, like a corrupted program running faulty code. External noise, other people’s expectations, and the constant pressure to measure up have clouded your vision. But that isn’t a dead end; it’s a signal that something needs to change. Chaos is often mistaken for the enemy, but it’s actually what drives transformation. It tears down outdated beliefs and forces you to face the limits you’ve unconsciously accepted. It scrambles the familiar patterns that have kept you boxed in and makes room for something new. The key isn’t to resist the disorder but to engage with it - to rewrite the code, sift through the static, and find the meaning in the madness. Growth doesn’t come from avoiding chaos, but from learning to navigate it and using it as raw material to build a stronger, more authentic self.

Through practices like meditation, introspection, or mental rehearsal, you can rewrite that code. Rational Chaoticism holds that life is a mind game, and that believing in your own ability to adapt and form new patterns is the most powerful tool you have. Reframe the chaos and put it to use. When you program your mind with intent, what you’re unlocking isn’t some ‘winner’s mindset’ but a fluid one, capable of handling both the peaks and the troughs. Success isn’t linear; it’s about learning to thrive in the turbulence. Two artists who really show this kind of evolution are Pablo Picasso and George Condo. Look at their bodies of work - from Picasso’s early academic studies to his revolutionary Cubist experiments, or from Condo’s classical influences to his distorted, psychologically charged portraits - and you can trace a striking transformation over time.

This isn’t just a case of practice makes perfect. Their careers are defined by pivotal moments where they took on radical shifts in technique, composition, and subject matter - not minor adjustments, but bold departures that redefined their artistic language. At key points, both artists came across ideas or techniques that changed their direction. Instead of staying tied to past successes, they absorbed these discoveries, let them take root, and then, years later, reinvented themselves again. That constant evolution kept their work moving forward while still keeping an unmistakable signature. Their artistic identities were never fixed; they adapted and mutated without losing their essence. This also ties in with what we talked about earlier with the art of forgetting: untying yourself from previous versions of yourself so you can grow.

In contrast, some artists - such as Warhol or Basquiat (sue me for saying so, but it’s true) - found a style that worked and leaned into it relentlessly, often to the point of repetition. Their work is still hugely influential, but it lacks the sense of reinvention that makes Picasso’s and Condo’s careers feel like living, breathing things. The willingness to transform is what separates those who refine a style from those who keep redefining art itself.

There are no limits here. No rules to follow, no techniques you must master, no materials that define you. Rational Chaoticism isn’t about skill, tradition, or fitting into some predetermined mould. It’s about the raw collision of rational thought and chaotic impulse. It’s about pushing forward, exploring, and committing to the work. You show up, you immerse yourself, you wrestle with ideas, and you let what you’re making take on a life of its own. That’s what matters, and that’s what lasts.

Forget whether you think you’re ‘good’ at art. There is no ‘good’. Good is showing up, good is practice, good is believing in yourself and giving yourself a damn chance. I don’t believe I have any special talent. I never studied the so-called proper techniques, and I’m certainly no prodigy - far from it in fact. But I trust the process, and I trust persistence. I slow things down, let the work breathe, and allow time and shifting perspectives to shape each piece. I build layer upon layer - not just paint on a canvas, but moments, thoughts, and revelations stacked on top of each other until something undeniable emerges. Something I feel proud to put out into the world.

This is what makes Rational Chaoticism limitless. Unlike so many art movements of the past - rigid, exclusive, obsessed with rules - this philosophy is open to anyone who’s willing to engage with it. There’s no entry requirement and no need for approval. As long as your work carries both the weight of reason and the energy of disorder, you’re free to create however you want.

Rationality is the anchor, the structure that keeps chaos from unravelling into nothing. But chaos is what keeps rationality from going stale and lifeless. Together, they open up endless possibilities. This isn’t about following a path, it’s about forging your own, and in that ever-shifting, unpredictable space, literally anything can happen. That unpredictability is where Rational Chaoticism gets its power. If you always know where you’re going, if every step is planned out, where’s the discovery? Where’s the risk? The best work doesn’t come from complete control but from a kind of controlled surrender, one that lets the work tell you what it needs and lets the unknown shape your vision. It’s not about abandoning rationality, and it’s not about throwing yourself recklessly into chaos. It’s about swerving between the two - knowing when to let structure guide you and when to break free of it entirely.

This is why technique doesn’t matter. Mastering a craft is useful, sure, but mastery alone doesn’t make something meaningful. The most technically perfect work can still be lifeless if there’s no chaos in it. And pure chaos without thought or intention is just noise. It’s the meeting of the two, the balance of thought and instinct, that makes something worth looking at.

Rational Chaoticism doesn’t tell you how to create; it only demands that you do. It doesn’t care about beauty, refinement, or even coherence. It asks for motion, for the act of making, for something that resists standing still. It asks that the work be real and meaningful, that it carries something of you, that it isn’t safe, and that it isn’t empty. Because when you create with that kind of honesty - when you let go of expectations and just make, without fear, without censoring yourself, without the weight of what you think art should be - you are free.

In the realm of Rational Chaoticism, there’s no such thing as a meaningless coincidence. Every unexpected encounter, every strange alignment of events, every gut feeling you can’t quite explain is part of a larger, interconnected web of cause and effect. What we usually dismiss as random is actually the universe nudging us, dropping clues, opening doors we didn’t know existed.

This idea, explored in James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, suggests that life is always communicating with us, just not in the way we’re used to listening. Instead of clear instructions or obvious signposts, it speaks in patterns, synchronicities, and moments of chance that seem too perfect to be accidental. You think of an old friend and they text you out of nowhere. You pick up a book at random and it answers a question you hadn’t even put into words yet. You take a wrong turn and stumble across something that shifts your whole perspective. These aren’t just flukes; they’re invitations. The universe is constantly showing us where to go next, but it’s up to us to notice. That’s the key - paying attention. Most of us go through our day-to-day assuming things just happen to us, never asking whether there’s a deeper rhythm at play. But what if we started treating these moments as more than luck? What if we saw them as signposts, clues in a puzzle only we can solve? Suddenly life stops feeling like a string of disconnected events and starts to feel like something bigger - something alive, shifting and responding to us as we move through it.

Of course, this doesn’t mean there’s a grand, predetermined plan where every little thing happens for a reason. Chaos still rules. But even in the chaos there’s an underlying intelligence, a current pulling us in certain directions. The better we get at recognising it, the more we can lean into it and make choices that feel less like guesses and more like alignment. The universe doesn’t shout. It whispers, and it’s up to us to listen. Imagine the universe as an endless web of cause and effect stretching out in every direction. Every choice you make, every chance encounter, every moment of hesitation or bold action sends vibrations through that web, shifting the course of your life in ways you may never fully understand. A train you just missed, a stranger’s passing comment, a book that falls open at the perfect page - these moments seem insignificant at the time, but they might be the hinges your future turns on.

Somewhere out there, in the vast expanse of possibility, another version of your life is playing out. One where you took the job instead of turning it down. One where you sent the message instead of deleting it. One where you hesitated for just a second longer, and everything changed. Some of these lives are barely different from the one you’re living now, a minor shift here or there. Others are unrecognisable, built on decisions so small you wouldn’t even remember making them. It’s easy to think of these alternate lives as abstract, theoretical things, distant versions of yourself you’ll never meet. But in a way they’re always with you, trailing just behind or hovering just ahead. Every day you stand at a crossroads, choosing which reality becomes yours. You can’t go back and take the roads you missed, but you can always choose the next turn.

These parallel possibilities are a reminder that reality isn’t a rigid, preordained track we’re doomed to follow. It’s fluid, and it shifts with every choice we make. Life isn’t something that simply happens to us; we’re actively shaping it, whether we realise it or not. The difference between feeling stuck and feeling like you’re exactly where you’re meant to be often comes down to how aware you are of these small but significant moments. Opportunities, setbacks, chance encounters - each one depends on everything around it. They’re all part of a larger pattern, a language the universe is constantly speaking, and the question is whether you’re paying attention. Once you start seeing life this way, the randomness takes on a different texture. Obstacles can be signposts, and challenges might be redirections rather than roadblocks. The better you get at recognising these moments for what they are - openings, invitations, choices - the more say you have in where your life goes.

To live within Rational Chaoticism is to move through life understanding that randomness is an illusion, at least in the way we currently understand it. Every moment and every decision, no matter how small, contributes to the shape of your life, like brushstrokes forming a painting you can only fully see in hindsight. The conversations you almost didn’t have, the choices you made without thinking twice, the seemingly insignificant detours - all of it matters.

We’ll never get to live out every version of ourselves. There will always be paths left unexplored, lives we’ll never know. But within all those possibilities, we have the power to decide which direction to step in, which gut feelings to trust, and which nudges from the universe to follow. And maybe that’s the real work - not controlling everything, but learning to recognise the moments that matter and having the courage to act on them.

Spending a long time working on something gives it a lifetime worthy of your own. That kind of commitment breathes a special vitality into the work, filling it with the time and energy you’ve put in. In this way, time itself becomes a silent collaborator. But the path of creation is never straightforward, and it shouldn’t be. Artists often hit a dead end, where inspiration dries up and progress feels impossible. The instinct is to force your way through, but sheer willpower rarely gives the work the depth and nuance it needs. The answer isn’t brute force; it’s deliberately letting chaos back into the process. Imagine you’re walking down a dark alleyway. The side you’re on is damp, cold and dingy; on the other side of the wall is safety and warmth. Obviously the other side is where you want to be. Instead of wearing yourself out trying to climb the wall - clawing at bricks, searching for footholds, feeling trapped by your circumstances - imagine something else entirely. Imagine reaching into your pocket, pulling out a piece of chalk, and drawing a simple square on the wall. And instead of a dead end, that square becomes a doorway. A portal. A way through to something new. Unrealistic, I know. But it works as an analogy for the point I’m making.

The difference between struggle and transformation often isn’t the obstacle itself, but how we choose to deal with it. Most people see a barrier and assume the only way forward is brute force - climbing, pushing, breaking through. But what if the real answer is not to fight, but to reimagine? To shift perspective? To realise the walls we run into aren’t as solid as they seem?

Maybe that chalk isn’t literal. Maybe it’s an idea you haven’t considered, a perspective you haven’t explored, a leap of faith you’ve been too scared to take. Maybe the portal is an unexpected opportunity disguised as failure, a chance encounter that changes your whole direction, or a flash of insight that rewrites the story you thought you were stuck in.

Walls are only impassable if we refuse to see the doors hidden in them. The trick is knowing when to stop climbing and start drawing. Creativity thrives when we step outside the rigid limits we’ve made up for ourselves and leave room for spontaneity and the unexpected. Working on a project for a long time can lead to tunnel vision, trapping you in a purely rational frame of mind. The antidote is stepping back - whether that’s sleep, meditation, or just walking away for a while - to reset and come back with fresh eyes. Sometimes that break lasts longer than hours or days; it can take weeks or even months. But that isn’t necessarily stagnation. It’s more like gestation. Working on other creative projects, or tending to the parts of your life you’ve been neglecting, gives new ideas room to grow. A sculptor might find clarity in music; a painter might rediscover their vision through travel. Creativity isn’t linear, it’s cyclical, and the richest work often comes not from relentless effort but from the ebb and flow of inspiration, discipline, and surrender.

It’s easy to slip into the illusion that you’re somehow special - that your experiences, your thoughts, your creativity lift you onto some higher plane, untouched by the world. It’s tempting to believe it, but the truth is simpler and far more freeing: you’re not the chosen one. You’re not a lone genius, self-contained and immune to influence. You’re flesh, blood, energy and thought, just like everyone else.

A Rational Chaoticist understands that they aren’t a singular force moving through the world on their own. They’re more like soft clay - shaped, reshaped, and moulded by every experience, every interaction, every moment. Every conversation, every book you’ve read, every argument, every late-night thought spiralling into the unknown - these are the hands that press into us and leave their marks. To resist this, to convince yourself you’re entirely self-made, is a dangerous delusion. It means ignoring the quiet, relentless shaping of your being by forces far older and larger than you. Every stroke of genius is built on foundations laid by others, whether they’re recognised or not. The melodies that move us are echoes of older songs; the philosophies we cling to are reworkings of age-old questions. Even rebellion is a response to something that came before. Life isn’t a solo act. It’s a collision of influences, a quilt stitched together from moments, insights, and the echoes of other people.

Throughout your journey you’ll meet people who change you in ways you never expected - some through kindness, some through conflict, some without even realising the effect they’ve had. Some will become your closest friends, others will hover on the edges of your life, and many you’ll forget entirely. But whether they’re a defining force or just leave a small impression, they shape you all the same. There’s no singular path, no divine script that makes you fundamentally different from anyone else. Your story, like everyone’s, is tangled up with history, with culture, and with the people who cross your path. Accepting that doesn’t make you smaller; it shows you how rich your existence actually is. You’re not above influence. You’re a product of it, a channel for it, and a contributor to it, and that’s a gift, not a weakness.

Discovering an artist whose work really resonates with you can change the whole direction of your practice. Influence has a way of seeping into your work, subtly at first - an unexpected shift in colour palette, a new appreciation for a particular symbol, a way of structuring a composition you hadn’t thought of before. Over time, these outside forces weave themselves into your practice, merging with your own instincts and experiences to form something entirely new.

The power of influence isn’t in copying, it’s in absorbing - taking in what moves you, breaking it down, questioning it, and letting it come back out in a form that’s your own. That’s the natural cycle of how artists evolve, the constant back-and-forth between individual creativity and collective inspiration. There’s no shame in influence, only in failing to acknowledge it. To dismiss influence as mere imitation is to misunderstand how artists grow in the first place. Every artist, no matter how groundbreaking, stands on the shoulders of those who came before. The raw, unfiltered energy of Basquiat, the dreamlike distortions of Dalí, the nightmarish chaos of Bosch - all of them reshaped the artistic landscape through a deep engagement with history, culture, and the work of their predecessors. Even the most revolutionary movements - Impressionism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism - weren’t spontaneous bursts of creativity, but reactions to the dominant ideas of their time. The new always comes out of the old, even when it’s trying to reject it.

Throughout my own life, I’ve been profoundly shaped by a wide range of artists. The emotive immediacy of Basquiat, the surrealist explorations of Dalí, the intricate grotesqueries of Bosch - all of them have left an imprint on how I work. Mandijn, Condo, Goya, Rubens - each name is a reminder of my inspirations, my muses, and the reason I started making art and still do. Their techniques, their philosophies, and their willingness to challenge artistic norms have merged with my own ideas and keep pushing my work forward. I don’t try to mimic them, but I don’t deny they’re there either. They’re in the edges of my compositions, in the tension between order and chaos, in the themes I choose to explore.

But influence isn’t just about direct inspiration; it’s about dialogue. When you really engage with an artist’s work, you’re not just an observer, you’re part of a conversation that spans time and space. To study Goya is to wrestle with the brutal realities of human nature. To immerse yourself in Dalí’s world is to question the limits of perception. To engage with Bosch is to walk the fine line between the absurd and the profound. And when you make work in response to these encounters, you’re adding your voice to a chorus that was singing long before you arrived and will keep going long after you’re gone.

This is why humility matters. The moment you think you’ve reached the peak of artistic understanding is the moment you stop growing. Believing your work is entirely your own, untouched by anything outside you, is a delusion. The Rational Chaoticist knows that creating means staying in flux, always learning. Influence isn’t a crutch, it’s a catalyst. It doesn’t water down originality; it feeds it. And it makes sure no single artist, philosophy, or voice ever becomes the final word on what art should be.

At its core, influence is about connection. It’s an acknowledgement that art doesn’t belong to the individual but to all of us. Your work is uniquely yours, but it’s also part of something much bigger - a conversation that never ends, where every voice matters, not because it’s the last word but because it adds another note. And maybe that’s the real purpose of art - not to claim ownership over an idea, but to keep the conversation going.

This principle lies at the heart of Rational Chaoticism, and it’s closely related to the last one. No idea, no work of art, no movement comes from nothing. Everything is a continuation - a reinterpretation, an evolution, a response to what came before. The past isn’t something to throw away in pursuit of originality; it’s the foundation everything is built on. History, both personal and collective, reminds us that the lone genius with a singularly revolutionary idea is a myth. Every innovation is a modification of something that already existed, and every artist is part of a conversation that stretches back through time. This book itself is a response, born out of the failures of postmodernism and deconstructivism, which set out to dismantle meaning but left very little in its place. Rational Chaoticism, by contrast, sits within a new movement: Reconstructivism. It doesn’t try to tear down but to build on; not to reject structure but to reshape it, embracing both order and disorder as necessary forces in the creative process.

The present isn’t an isolated point but a bridge between what has been and what’s coming. Every action, however small, ripples forward and shapes the future in ways we can’t really see. Success and failure aren’t random, separate events but connected steps in a bigger process. Even the things we see as failures - rejections, wrong turns, moments of doubt - are a necessary part of moving forward. They shape us, refine us, and push us towards what’s next. The universe may look chaotic, but its motion follows patterns, and its randomness has an unseen logic underneath it.

If you’re unhappy with where you are, know that this is part of the process too. Highly ambitious people often live in a state of constant dissatisfaction, with every achievement overshadowed by the next goal, the next milestone. The goalposts keep moving, always just out of reach. That hunger for progress is both a blessing and a curse. It drives us forward and fuels our creative work, but it often costs us our happiness in the present. The mind tells us real fulfilment lies in the next big achievement, the next step up, the next bit of validation. But if we’re always chasing, when do we let ourselves just be?

Try looking at it another way. Think back to your younger self - the kid who first started dreaming, the moment your passion first took hold. What did you want back then? Would that younger version of you be amazed at how far you’ve come? If not, why not? What expectations have shifted, and are they really yours, or have they been shaped by outside pressures?

Now look forward. Picture yourself at eighty, looking back on a lifetime of choices. Will you measure your life by the achievements you collected and the ambitions you fulfilled, or by the moments in between? Neither childhood nor old age defines us. It’s who we were in the spaces between - the journey itself - that makes us who we are.

What comes next will always be tied to what came before. You can’t erase your past, and you can’t force your future into a predetermined mould. But you can shape it. You can choose what you do now, recognise the patterns, see how everything in your life is woven together, and honour the process, not just the destination.

The present is momentary. The past can’t be changed. The future is coming either way. But within that, you have power - not to rewrite history or dictate what’s to come, but to step forward with awareness, knowing every step you take isn’t an isolated act but part of something much greater than yourself.