It Has a Shape: Why We Insist on Putting Chaos in Order

Summary: From Stephen Sondheim to the therapy room: why we're constantly straightening crooked pictures, tidying drawers, and giving things back their shape

In the documentary "Six by Sondheim," the composer Stephen Sondheim talks about two things that seem, on the face of it, unrelated: his love of teaching and his approach to writing musicals. It's precisely in that apparent disconnect that the link lies. Sondheim almost never mentions inspiration. Instead, he describes writing as a methodical act, like solving a crossword or assembling a puzzle. And that's where teaching comes in: it, too, is ultimately about organization and giving things shape. The teacher takes an enormous mass of knowledge, shapes it, and fits it into a form someone else can understand and absorb.

These two impulses — to create and to teach — apparently spring from a shared root: the deep human need to bring order to chaos, to give things a shape that lets us understand them.

We do this automatically, with no need for any theory at all. We straighten a crooked picture on the wall. We stop ourselves mid-sentence and start over until it says exactly what we meant. We complain when something social happens in a way that "has no shape" to it. All these small acts are part of a larger rebellion: resistance to the constant tendency of things to fall apart, to unravel, to slide into chaos.

Ever since we were expelled from Eden — or simply because we don't live like ordinary animals — almost everything in our world withers or runs wild if we don't tend to it. Again and again we try to give things back their shape. Not to make them perfect, but so that they can go on sustaining us. There's a certain pleasure in this, a kind of ASMR effect, when something scattered suddenly falls back into place.

It'll be okay

The ancient Greeks understood the deep connection between beauty and shape. The Greek word for "beautiful," eumorphos, contains within it the word morphe — shape. And what's ugly? Askhēmōn — without schema, without shape. Beauty, in this sense, isn't a matter of decoration or charm. It's coherence. Something is considered beautiful when its parts fit together in harmony. The line of a building, the arc of a melody, the movement of a human gesture — all of these can evoke a sense of beauty when they testify to some inner order. To say something is beautiful is really to say: it fits. Hebrew, too, has a perfect expression for this: "b'seder" — in order. In other words, when things are "in order," we're doing fine.

It's important to say: I'm not talking about ideals of "good taste," or the cultural standards that, as Pierre Bourdieu showed, serve to entrench power and reproduce social hierarchies. The distinction between "beautiful" and "ugly" in contexts like that is designed to force people into a normative framework — to make them feel lacking, to push them to consume in order to "fix" themselves. I mean beauty in a deeper sense: a feeling of coherence, of internal fit. A state in which different parts come together in a way that feels right, not forced and not dictated from the outside.

The human body is a striking example. A healthy baby is a masterpiece of order: trillions of cells, each in its place, working in perfect coordination. There's something awe-inspiring in the way that structure holds itself together — and in how even the smallest injury to it feels almost unthinkable (anyone say "circumcision"?). Over the years, entropy does its work: systems wear down, structures soften, and the internal architecture loses its stability.

Fit, simplicity, movement

Civil society works the same way. When it's healthy, its institutions and social ties function like organs in a living body. When it's sick, order breaks down: people fear the police instead of seeing it as protection, the prime minister inspires contempt instead of respect, the garbage doesn't get collected, there's violence in the schools, people drive against traffic, and even the backbone of the system — elections — no longer feels like something you can lean on. Order, in both cases, isn't an abstract idea. It's what lets life flow through a structure without collapsing it.

Of course, not every kind of order is alive. Sometimes what looks like order is only a performance — rigid, decorative, coerced. When I said "beautiful," I didn't mean the familiar beauty standard. And when I say "social order," I'm not calling for a fascination with fascist aesthetics. History is full of regimes that turned the aesthetics of order into a tool of control: straight lines, perfect symmetry, uniform outfits, choreographed gestures. All of these mimic harmony, but they're brittle — they aren't truly alive. The idea that North Korea's supreme leader lives without an anus is a funny but illuminating example of this exact point.

True shape allows for movement, response, growth. It knows how to bend without breaking. Fake order, by contrast, rests on fear. It wants the appearance of beauty, without the vitality that would make it meaningful.

In the world of ideas, too, people have believed for centuries that you can identify truth by its shape. Einstein believed that the universe's deepest truths would be revealed in structures that were not just correct but elegant, and that simplicity and clarity weren't a sign of naivety but of depth. Long before him, the principle of "Occam's razor" argued that when two explanations compete to account for the same phenomenon, the simpler, clearer explanation that manages to account for more phenomena is probably the one closer to reality. We recognize truth because it "sits right" with us, and once it does, it lets us see the pattern beneath the surface.

Searching for the hidden structure

Something similar happens in the therapy room. Sometimes the conversation feels like co-writing a text. A sentence lands exactly right, some hidden connection becomes clear, and both patient and therapist catch a glimpse of the whole puzzle. These are moments of clarity, almost aesthetic in nature, in which past and present, authentic self and psychological defenses, what can be changed and what needs to be accepted — all find their place within a single coherent picture.

These moments stand out against the backdrop of how we live most of the time: a sequence of passing moments, with no clear structure. We experience separate events — one thing leads to another without our always identifying the connection. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, there's a beauty of its own in it, maybe even a kind of Buddhist quality of making peace with momentary flow, with formlessness.

But therapy offers a different kind of space: a place to lift your head above the relentless sequence, to look back — or more precisely, from the balcony — and identify hidden structures. To see the threads connecting what happened once to what we're doing today. To distinguish between the core parts of our personality — the ones that want to be preserved and nourished — and the defensive patterns that developed in response to old hurts or fears, and no longer serve us.

In moments like these, therapeutic work resembles assembling a puzzle: at first there are only scattered pieces on the table, then lines and connections start to emerge, and finally a shape comes into focus that you can find your bearings in. The meaning isn't only cognitive — it runs emotionally deep. It's an experience of internal organization: a life story that begins to make sense from the inside.

The idea of hidden connections also appears in spiritual and mythological spaces — the belief that the world contains parts that look scattered but actually belong to one another. Kabbalah has the concept of the "sparks" — fragments of divine light that scattered throughout the world and are waiting to be gathered and restored to their place. In Plato's "Symposium," it's told that the world is full of halves of original human souls, separated from one another, spending their lives searching for their other half.

These ideas are one more expression of the belief that what looks like randomness isn't truly random, but part of some larger whole, and that we have an active role to play in mending it or putting it back in order. That may also be why work in which we restore things to their natural place — from connecting ideas to creating harmony between people — is experienced not only as aesthetic but as a moral act.

Perhaps such acts are aesthetic precisely because they are moral: because they touch on a balance that isn't merely visual or intellectual, but reflects something fundamental about our human sense of order and of good.

Originally published in Haaretz on October 30, 2025.