“When the winds of change rage, some build windmills while others build shelters”
– Chinese Proverb
On its own, building shelters seems reasonable. If you’re expecting catastrophic weather, isn’t that the responsible thing to do? Yet, windmills indicate that there is a whole other possibility: to see opportunity in crisis.
In Nassim Nicholas Talab’s words, windmills are antifragile:
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty… Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better”.
Antifragile (p. 3), Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Why am I talking about the antifragile? Because its seems like the perfect antidote to the fact that:
Chaos is Weaved into Life
Here are some of unfathomable changes that await all of us in our life:
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- We will age.
- We will suffer in unpredictable ways.
- We will lose people who seem immortal.
- We will be shaken thoroughly—and sometimes for the best.
We spend much of our lives in denial of these truths—that’s understandable, they aren’t the most appetizing lunch accompaniments. Yet over time, we recognize in bits and pieces that life is predictably chaotic and we prepare.
Yet, even when we do prepare, we do so largely by building shelters. We buy insurance and graft for financial security, we try to build guardrails around the ones we love. And all this is crucial.
But how many of us ever build windmills?
Shouldn’t we at least entertain the possibility that we could learn to thrive in chaos?
My only goal here is to get us thinking about thriving in chaos instead of merely surviving it. But if do so, we must face the further question of how we might even begin to thrive in chaos. Here, I’d love to hear your thoughts via comments, but I can get us started.
I’m betting that being antifragile in life will have a lot to do with training our minds. To see windmills where others see wind, we’ll need gratitude and opportunism. To stop dressing for a summer that’s already turned cold, we’ll need perspective and the clarity to release the past.
In general, I think, the antifragile would wear life loosely. They would wake into reality every morning as if for the first time. And they’d cultivate a certain amnesia around the things that could have been. They’d be optimists. And they would always find a reason to celebrate.
If you liked this short piece, you will enjoy my emails. I am hoping to build a community of thoughtful people who wonder about life, and I’d love for you to be a part of it.
I appreciate your being here.