On Entropy - Part 1
January 25, 2020

     Lest anyone (myself included) think I‛m peddling some sort of secular version of a health and wealth gospel here, I have one word: entropy.

     The second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of entropy, states that a closed energy system – i.e., a system without an external source of energy – will always increase in disorder until all of its energy is spent (until it reaches a state of "equilibrium").  Order cannot spontaneously arise in a closed system.  This means that, absent an injection of external energy, any order that is created in a closed system comes at a cost: a corresponding amount of disorder elsewhere in the system.  In the end, Chaos is King.

     This, my friends, is a sobering thought.

 * * *

     I yearn for order.  I crave it, like a pregnant woman craves pickles or ice cream (pickles and ice cream?) – or, in my case, really high-quality marinara.  I need order.  

     When I was in college, my roomates knew they could drive me crazy if they came in my room while I was out, and moved any of my stuff.  I was one of "those" people, the kind who kept things in such a state of order that I could tell if someone had moved something a few inches or swapped out one small decorative item for another.  My junior high friends were worse.  For some reason, my mom never locked the laundry room entryway door to our house.  So when we were gone, a few of my close  friends would sneak into the house (did their parents bring them?), disgorge the contents of my sock and underwear drawers, and fling hosiery and such all over the room.  I don't know how many times I came home late in the evening, exhausted from a long horseback riding lesson or some other regular excursion, flipped on the light in my bedroom, and found pantyhose strung from my light fixture to my bedposts and bras and underwear strewn hither and yon.  My friends were ruthless, underwear leprechauns that they were.  They thought it was hilarious.  It infuriated me every time. 

     My tolerance for chaos has increased dramatically since those days.  I married a giant leprechaun, and together we have made a little tribe of small leprechauns.  These days, it is the contents of the kids' various toy boxes that get disgorged and flung all over the house.  And because we're building a small working farm here, the floor of our house usually features a thin layer of straw bits and grit.  I ferociously enforce a no-wearing-shoes-in-the-house policy, but it barely stems the tide.  

     It's safe to say I‛ve relaxed my standards a bit, if only to avoid outright insanity.  Straw bits are just farm glitter, I tell myself.  (But I hate actual glitter, I retort.)  Nonetheless, I still crave order.  I just have to get my fix in shorter bursts, more discrete units.  After several years in which I rarely made the bed – infants, housekeeping, and the practice of law don‛t lend themselves to such serenity – I now try to make it as often as possible, which usually means about 50% of the time.  And I luxuriate in the roughly twenty minutes per week when my kitchen is clean and my floors are vacuumed.  I have to take my bliss where I can get it.  

    So when I started thinking seriously about entropy last year, it very nearly plunged me into depression.  So you're telling me, I argued with the invisible scientists, that every time I do a load of laundry – thus increasing the level of order in my own household – I'm actually contributing to the disorder of the broader world?  

     The answer is yes – but that‛s not the end of the story, I learned.  More to come. 

 * * *

     The cost of finishing this post: one of the dogs just peed on the floor.  He's a leprechaun too.