Why a little space for chaos in your life is très bien
It was a sentence that lingered after reading an interview with Renée Koudstaal in Het Parool, author of the book ‘Living like a Parisienne, even if you are completely Dutch’. The woman in Paris makes time for a little chaos. What is it about the magic surrounding the Parisienne and more importantly: what is that chaos in your life good for?
It's striking, because if you type chaos in your life into Google, you get a thousand-and-one articles on how you could solve that. Dutch-language tips, mind you, it seems to be quite the nature of the beast. But the Parisienne embraces that chaos, should we do that more too?
Chaos gives original ideas, says Tim Harford in his book ‘Messy’. Of course, you want to make room for that. But just room for chaos, how do you plan that in? Because doesn't chaos often arise when there is too little time and everything has to happen at once? Research shows that the French have more free time than, for example, we do. About 36 vacation days compared to the usual 25 in the Netherlands. On top of that, the workweek in France averages 35 hours compared to 40, and voilà. Additionally, vacations are sacred and almost every French person says they work to live and not live to work. Perhaps this is the mindset we lack to become a Parisienne with room for just that little bit of chaos in her life.
But honestly: maybe the secret of the Parisienne is that by allowing space for chaos, her life never becomes boring. People don't just fall one by one to monotony for nothing. With a little more laissez-faire, things could just go differently than usual. And those times when we went to bed on time, didn't open an extra bottle of wine, and were too early for an appointment, we can never remember later. Only that time when everything went differently than planned.
This is a piece of Parisienne that I embrace. You embrace it. Although I think I will never master the finesse of being less noisy and eating delicious things in moderation, I am completely okay with that.
