I’m turning 46 tomorrow (!) and still processing the last year and what I want this one to look like, so I’m not sure I have a clear birthday “word for the year” yet. But I think it might be the ideas found in these two unrelated articles.
The first is a dense essay about how the idea of entropy should change our philosophy–“what would our metaphysics and ethics look like if we learned that reality was against us?” The author spends a lot of time getting there, but his idea of “goodness” in a decaying universe was really striking:
“Goodness could consist in any act that seeks, however briefly, to bend the entropic thrust of existence back upon itself – holding it at bay, even if only momentarily. We glimpse this resistance in acts of compassionate care for the suffering, and in efforts to minimise the harm we inflict on the world around us.”
Echoing that idea, the second essay is actually a short post from author Max Gladstone, an allegory about a cast-iron pan he had to restore. He ends it thusly:
One thing we can do against that moment when “all that is solid melts into air,” is to not let it. Fix the thing that seems broken. Form and build the bonds that seem so fragile and so easily torn away. Maybe you can’t walk forever into the wind of change—but each step does matter, and if you can’t imagine even taking a step, at least you can try. […] The Buddha’s right, I think, that all things are transient and empty of inherent fixed being and that the root of suffering can be found in clinging to impermanent things as if they were permanent, but when he says all he really means it, he’s talking about us. You, me, the cast iron pan, the world, we’re all in this together. If the perfect state is impermanent, unfixed—that must apply to the broken state as well. The mess is a gateway to the work, the practice, and at the end of the day, the practice is what we have.
“The mess is a gateway to the work” hit me as hard as “luxurious complications.” Maybe that’s my phrase for 46.
