Reflection #11

An entropic slow motion fall

I accidentally dropped a glass and, as usual when I drop a glass, it was a wine glass. It shattered when it hit our hard tile floor. I stared at the detritus that once served a useful function and shook my head at the knowledge it would never be useful again. Its mass had now separated and scattered, transmogrifying from an organized, cohesive whole into something that could now only be described as pieces of something that were previously a single, useful object. It had been something useful, something that was ordered, something that had a function, but now there’s nothing useful left…just broken shards and bits glass. That's entropy. Glasses shatter but shards of glass don't randomly become glasses again. The universe gets more and more chaotic as it ages, or perhaps it ages only because gets it gets ever more chaotic, never less chaotic. Perhaps time is an emergent property of entropy? Do our thoughts, our lives, our relationships develop entropy as well? An mistaken utterance angers. Perhaps it was taken the wrong way, or perhaps you said it whilst consumed by a white hot flame of anger which blinded you to more rational thoughts. In any case, you can't take it back. Perhaps that relationship is now broken, or strained. There is now entropy. Although, relationships, unlike wine glasses, can survive entropy through the miracle of forgiveness. Our bodies valiantly fight against entropy, and even manage to slow it for many decades, but we are also slowly breaking down, just like that wine glass. Our lives, a struggle between the gravity of entropy and the parachute of our life energy, are an entropic slow motion fall in one direction and we mostly pretend we aren't falling so we don't have to think about what happens when we hit the ground.

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