Of change (pt.2), entropy and other failed satisfactions.

Last week I elaborated on change, particularly human capability to change. I made the conclusion about that clear (at least what I think of it), but the talk is far from over. Change is a powerful subject, one of my favorites to be honest. The word change carries the very essence of what gives hope its meaning. It quite shamelessly points out our discomfort when it comes to stability, or let me rephrase it, perpetuation. I consciously chose an emotionally indifferent word that could describe any situation. May it be positive or negative we simply want things to change, hopefully for the better. We get fed up so easily and so fast turning our heads around looking for a better thing to come along, especially when we are caught up in troublesome situation. It is out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new attitude that drives us. 

As it is everything that I write here inspired by what goes on in my or someone else´s life, so it happens that change lately pervades most of the topics I have with my friends. I guess there must be something in the air or maybe it is just the fact we reached that age when we ask ourselves what is going on and reflect on life we led up to this very point, remembering the visions we had when we were 20 and evaluating current manifestations. More and more of my friends complain that their life has come to a halt. Nothing seems to move forward. Everything stays the same. They feel as if some grand master pressed the pause button and wants them to observe the frozen picture on the screen. To see what precisely? What is there to see that one has not already seen? It is, after all, them who lead their life consciously; no one can tell them what else is there. And, is it really true that life stopped even though they feel life stepped into purgatorial state?


If one would be asked to make a survey of how people describe life with one word, I am pretty sure the most common answers would be various synonyms of “chaotic”. True. Life is far from being ordered. On the contrary, disorder reigns everywhere. It appears as if whole nature follows one simple rule: things tend to disorder rather than order. This tendency is called Entropy. According to Boltzmann, Entropy is defined as the number of ways we can rearrange the microscopic constituents of a system without changing its macroscopic appearance. Meaning, when we have tea that we pour milk into and stir, milk and tea mix. And when mixed, we can continue stirring, but the appearance never changes. Considering that from a microscopic point of view, there are bazillion of molecules in that mixture and precisely n = bazillion! ways to rearrange them, but on the outside mixture looks the same. Truly high disorder means very low entropy state. And this is the thing about entropy.   

According to the second law of thermodynamics, things tend to even out in order to reach equilibrium state with the surroundings. That is why ice melts, water cools, egg brakes, glass shatters, paper tears and book has only one way to make sense. If we mix words in a sentence, it to really is meaning easy lose the. Of course, we can boil the water, make ice, rearrange pages of the book and mix back the words in the previous sentence: “it is really easy to lose the meaning”. But it will demand some energy input, this is how it works. For organisms to preserve this high order state we are in energy is needed. That is why more complex organisms, such as humans, are so inefficient in using available energy. However, we would have a hard time putting torn paper in the starting condition. And if you can manage to put egg back together or make glass reassemble itself, well then science has some explaining to do. It is impossible. And this change of states, this irreversible tendency for things to happen only in one direction gave birth to conceptualization of time. Time is not measured by the passage of each and single moment rather it is a consequence of irreversibility of states. These changes are the ones I turn to when I talk about “life happens”. Life happens, because things change. Everything changes. It must follow the law of thermodynamics that nothing can escape from. We die. We die, because it is impossible for us to maintain the state we begun our existence with. So much energy is lost along the way. Besides it is then when we reach the equilibrium. But leaving the grim consequence of that aside, what is more interesting is the fact that things do change all of the time. Life therefore does not stop, it cannot stop. If we consider people of the world, or all organisms of the Universe for that matter, as molecules in a glass where we mixed so much there is no telling the difference between one mixed state and another, then we see, life is going on inside with no visual difference on the bigger scale. We do not even get the chance to decide whether to take part in it or not. We are in it already. We only interpret it as a failure or success, where definitions of that vary with everyone´s expectations.  

Changes happen, we need not worry about it. There is nothing we can do about it. So, it is not the life that sucks, nor the situations that are troublesome. It is our interpretation that makes us unhappy and that is why we want to have the change. Change will come. Be sure about it. It will come because you are not only your own life, you are in the net of all of lives interconnected, that inevitably influence your own actions and decisions to undertake them. The change will come, but that does not mean you will like it. What you can do is working on how to deal with it. My yogi master says: “Fuck it! That is the way it is! Accept it!” Zen says: “Wait for things to come your way!” Waiting is as important as being active.

So, why we get so easily bored? Why we get so easily unhappy? It seems we rush into things, thinking we know them, imagining we know what we want. We tend not to see the reality the way it is. We are masters of make believe and denial. We should not crave for a change. We should crave for the moment of clear vision what is right for us. And when we find it, we should work for it. That way we would be satisfied.  More satisfied. Longer satisfied? But satisfaction, too, will undergo the change. That is when work is required to maintain the starting position. Many people do not understand that. Relationship for example, is work. Being in love is a state one has to reanimate over and over again. And most importantly happiness is not out there. It is not related to any-body or any-thing, but to ourselves. If it were, one could make us happy for a longer time not only until departure and something would make us happier "forever", since things tend to last longer than the span of human life. But that is not the case. Not at all! We grow miserable because we build up expectations. We want things to be preserved or untwine the way we want. It is not in our power to do that. We are subjects to a change, too. We deteriorate. We correlate and we co-depend. 

Mother Teresa said: “There is no key to happiness, the door is always open!” She was a wise woman. And she never complained. Not that we know of, anyways. 

And there is that!