Everything wants to stay together

''Entropy'' is the concept that everything in the universe wants to devolve to a state of randomness: basically, that everything wants to fall apart.

For example, it’s harder (and takes more energy) to turn a pile of sand into a sandcastle than it is to turn a sandcastle into a pile of sand. I’m sure this has something to do with Newton’s Laws.

But today I realized that objects live in dread of entropy: this demotion from being “stuff” to “junk”. All it takes is one mishap, and that wooden footstool you’ve had since you were a kid ends up on the scrap heap; that teacup from Auntie Sue ends up in the bin.

An item at the garbage dump feels sad: it held on for soooo long – only to lose out, in the end, and end up compacted between a Styrofoam cup and an orange peel in an eight cubic metre cube of trash.


You see, everything follows an imperfect arc of anti-entropy -- starting as not much, just raw materials; peaking at some maximum level of ''something-ness''; and then crashing back down to ''not-much-ness''.

That piece of paper where I wrote my Reading Comprehension answers in third grade? It went from wood pulp, to paper, to schoolwork. Then it was further upgraded to paper airplane. For a long period of grace -- thirty-plus years -- it sat at that pinnacle of order and assembly-ness in a box in my parents’ attic -- until I, as a forty year old man, rediscovered it.

Upon its rediscovery, its state of being was balanced on a quantum precipice: would I recycle it, to become paper for another child’s homework assignment? Would I toss it on the compost heap, where it would return to dirt? Or – as it so happened – would I transfer it to another box (with other childhood keepsakes), and keep it for another thirty years?


Even people are like that. I’m forty years old, and I think I’m at my physical apex. This is as good as it gets. My body is **just** starting to – slowly – fall apart.


Here’s the point: there’s a brief, fragile moment in time that everything -- teacups, home electronics, humans -- are at their pinnacle of together-ness. Everything crafted or manufactured in your personal environment is only a mis-step away from falling off its pinnacle of created-ness, to be devoured by entropy.


And **that** -- I realized -- I why I keep broken junk.


--GG