During a visit to the Penn Dixie Fossil Park outside of Buffalo, NY, two weeks ago, I was reminded that a half-century ago, a fellow classmate in my first-year Geology class dubbed us the Friends of Entropy. He noted we were getting college credit for something we were already especially good at: which was, taking things from a stable and ordered state and transforming them with energy and enthusiasm into randomness. Then as now, we approached ancient rock formations -- this one perhaps 400 million years old -- took them from their unimaginably dormant and unchanged states, enthusiastically broke them up, and distributed them as curiosities.
James Clear does a very nice explanation of the Laws of Thermodynamics and their application to human behavior, so I'll leave that to him, and stick to my lived experience.
This morning, I'm trying to embrace the entropy I'm creating for myself.
I left my 212-year-old house with its established order. Instead, I had things spread out in a hotel room to go back into a travel case. I carefully untangled and wound the power cords for this device and my phone. I'm no longer a Friend of Entropy. I'm now a disciple. I know the cords will shake with my carrying, shake on the plane, and that shaking accelerates the entropy of tangling in a way still a bit mysterious to physics.
And if I had been a true friend of entropy, I wouldn't have closed the lid on my laptop before accepting a cup of coffee.
What I've learned in those fifty years, is that I have a limited amount of time, attention, and energy available to create small conditions of temporary order. That temporary order opens the possibility for meaning.
That's why I closed the laptop lid before taking the coffee cup.
That's why I'm writing this to you. I'm enthusiastically creating small conditions of order that make meaning possible.
From a different rock formation fifty years ago, I had broken off another sample. This formation is considered by geoscience to be 2.1 billion years old. It's surprisingly ordinary-looking. It's just a rock. I pass it frequently to ask, will any of this matter, in another 2.1 billion years?
I think the answer is, that's not my job. My job is to make this moment count.
Warmly,
Francis Sopper
- Thanks and appreciation to geologist Kat Moran-Smith for her expertise.