Chaos Resilience
Welcome to the New Year! We hope you’ve entered into 2025 in a peaceful way after what was likely a full holiday season. The new year, for me, often brings with it a feeling of wanting a fresh start in my spaces. Because it’s quite cold where I live in these early months of the year, my family spends more time in our home and we have a slower pace than when we are trying to maximize the lovely weather that fall and spring bring. These months at home are a great time to do a little organizational refresh, and these refreshes have been made so much simpler since I learned the concept of Chaos Resilience. We mention chaos resilience frequently in blogs and social media captions because it is truly one of our core values at House Peace. Simply put, chaos resilience is the ability to return back to the organization system we already created when chaos happens. One thing that is certain no matter what your life is like is that there will be moments or even seasons of chaos. Maybe your kids are in a sport that dictates your life every year for a couple of months, or maybe a loved one gets very sick and you’re focused on caring for them for a period of time. Maybe your daily life feels a bit chaotic on the regular, like mine does from the hours of 3pm-7pm in the post-school-pre-bedtime survival hours. No matter how or why you experience chaos, the fact is that we all do, so it’s important that we implement systems when we have the capacity to do it so that we can go back to those systems when we feel overwhelmed with life.
So now we know what chaos resilience is; let’s talk about how we achieve it.
Possibly the most important aspect of chaos resilience is that everything must have a home. When things don’t have a home, how do we know where to put them when we’re ready for our space to be peaceful once again? This can look different for everyone, but the goal is for you (or anyone in your home) to be able to pick up an item and know where it goes when it needs to be put away. I don’t care if, in your home, shoes go in the closet or in a basket by the door, but there should be a place where shoes go every time you’re putting away shoes. The next important aspect of chaos resilience that goes hand-in-hand with this is labeling. Labeling is an important part of the process because it reminds you and everyone else in your house what the designated home is for each item. So, if you’ve decided that the children’s art supplies belong in a lidded bin on a shelf in their closet, that lidded bin should be labeled with “art supplies” so that you, your partner, your children, and any potential babysitters all know exactly where to put the crayons and markers when it’s time to tidy. One of the places that I have found labels to be the most important element of achieving chaos resilience in my home is in our admin drawer in the kitchen. This drawer (often referred to as a “junk drawer” but do we really want junk in our home?) houses many items that don’t necessarily have another place to live and that we access often such as pens & pencils, paper clips & rubber bands, scissors, etc. Because 6 people live in our home and not all 6 of us respect (or can read) the labels I’ve put on the organizers in the drawer, it occasionally gets a bit disheveled. Thanks to labels, I can quickly and easily put everything back where it belongs when the drawer gets out of hand, or I can ask another person to do it because the organizing work already happened and we just need to get back to how it was when the work was initially done.
Drawer organizers and labels help keep this admin draw in Chaos Resilient shape!
Ok - we know the what and the how of chaos resilience. Let’s talk about the why.
Chaos has a tendency to paralyze us. Sometimes it’s because our brains simply can’t function at full capacity because of the emotional or logistical burden we’re carrying, and sometimes it’s because we have to prioritize whatever is urgent and everything else is just going to have to wait for another day. If we allow ourselves to create a space that is resilient to that chaos during a season that is more calm, when the stuff hits the fan at a later date, we can almost brainlessly enter back into that peaceful space because we set it up in such a way that is easy to recover.
If you need help with the initial jumpstart to chaos resilience, we’d love to come to your home and help you set it up in a way that is manageable for you. You can also drop us a DM on Instagram if you have a quick question and just need a bit of advice - we’re always here for you!
— Colleen
PS. You can get to know me and my family a little more here!