Structure is what we dream of. We create governments, write laws, invent organized religions, arrange ourselves into neat little family units, and go about our lives assuming that everything is in order, just as we wish it to be. We are Homo sapiens, and we feel that our large brains and opposable thumbs set us apart from the rest of the animals. And on many levels, they do. We love to pretend that our lives are structured and perfect, that we have reached the apex of civilization, that this is a good thing and that we will never revert back to the instincts that got us here. We believe we have abandoned these instincts, discarded them like so much genetic garbage, no longer needed or wanted.

But we must be careful. There exists in each and every one of us a propensity for chaos—a primal desire to return to the plains and forests, to the lives of our early ancestors. And this is not necessarily wrong. Some paleontologists have argued, quite effectively, that our hunter-gatherer forebears were, in many regards, happier and more fulfilled than the members of our structured, modern society.

We say that we want order in our lives, that we wish for calm and peace and structure. And to some extent, we do. But deep down in the recesses of our brains, we know that this is not the whole truth. There is a section of our consciousness, tangled in the mysteries of our DNA, that remembers the days when we lived in the wild west of human evolution. When we were at home among the beasts… when we were not at the top of the food chain. There is a part of us that we hide, ignore, and pretend no longer exists, but it is always there. Hunt, fight, fuck, kill, die, survive… We come from chaos. And though we may fool ourselves with gods and governments and laws and courts and our busy, structured, insignificant little lives, somewhere there remains that spark, that fragment, that section of us that, on some primordial level, longs to return home.

This doesn’t mean that we should give in to chaos, but neither should we ignore it. It is who we are. It should be recognized that on some level we are still wild animals. Extremely intelligent wild animals, as far as animals go, but wild nonetheless. The key is to harness our raw emotions, to transform them into something productive, and to do our best to live up to the brain size granted to us by millions of years of evolution. In the end, none of us survive—not permanently. Neither does the Earth or the sun or our solar system or galaxy. But that is out of our control. All that we can do is accept it and try to make the most of our short lives, focusing on what we can control and finding peace in the face of the inevitable.

You need not look to holy books to discover morals, nor need you look to government to ensure that you follow them. These principles are written into our genetic code. If we treat our tribe with respect and kindness, our tribe is better off and everyone’s chances of survival are increased. Because, after all, the overall meaning of life is to survive, at least for a while. And though our tribes may have grown to unmanageable numbers, it is not impossible to still adopt the tribal mindset of prehistoric man—protect, love, survive—albeit on a grander scale.

We must all count on each other. In the end, we are all we have.

This essay is not an indictment of structure. The universe is governed by a set of natural, scientific, structured laws. But, prior to these laws becoming established, our known universe exploded in a chaotic, frantic, violent birth. As it has often been said, from chaos comes order. We are not separate from chaos just as we are not separate from the known universe. We are a part of it, and it is a part of us. This is the Chaos Section of our lives—recognizing and embracing the chaos within us, and understanding that it is as fundamental to our existence as the structure we seek to impose on it.

 Author: Nick Allison is just a banged-up Army Infantry vet. He lives in Austin, TX with his wife, their kids, and two big, dumb, ugly mongrel dogs. Don’t take anything he says too seriously—he’s just trying to figure out this ride we call existence like everyone else. Also, he enjoys writing his own bio in third person because, let’s face it, it probably makes him feel more important.