Tag: Second Law of Thermodynamics

Appealing against the Second Law

I’d like to protest the passing of time.

Photo by Elena Koycheva on Unsplash

It’s a humane feature of earthly laws that you can appeal.

The law I’d really like to appeal against, though, is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is roughly, everything gets old, wears out dies.

I’ve had it with seeing what Time and the Second Law do to people. What is this force that takes good people, drains them into a wizened hulk, then tosses them aside? How can that be right? I wish to appeal on behalf of the spry 85-year-olds I know who any time soon will hardly be able to climb onto their perch, and a little later, will have fallen completely off it. Good, strong people. Old age so isn’t fair.

Can you appeal? A lot of people, most of us, try to defy the Second Law or hold it back. It doesn’t really work, of course. But can you actually appeal? Since we are dealing with the created order here, we would have to appeal directly to the Creator. And we have a clue in our favour, namely the life, death and resurrection of God the Son, Jesus Christ.

So our appeal. Best to bring the issue to the One God and ask him to think about it in the light of his total Godness. That is, just be God, God. In all your total love, justice and mercy, faced with these things that you created, namely (1) the Second Law, and (2) people made in your image, made in your love, just be totally yourself.

If one can so speak.

And when you do that, what results? I don’t think we really can know. But I’m thinking, if the appeal is granted, and I can see how it might be, the eternal state that results isn’t just about halting time’s flow. I would quite to have my twenty-three year-old body back (halting time in that sense) but I’d quite like to hang onto my much older head, please. And when I think about it, the pattern of childhood, youth, midlife, old age, each with their attendant joys, are all lovely and I wouldn’t like to miss any of them. I wonder if Eternity will be still be roiled by the slowly passing seasons? I kinda hope so.

But it that’s the case, and if you appeal to God against the Second Law, asking God to be totally God in all of this, what does a successful appeal look like? I think it looks like hope, new birth, regeneration.

The really bitter thing about the Second Law is not really the ageing, or the weakening, or the becoming erratic and vulnerable. All that can be covered by love, at the end of life, just as it is covered by love at the beginning of life. No, the really bitter thing is when people fall away into a dark pit of hopelessness. So that I will never see them again. I will never know them again. I will never enjoy them again. We will never talk together again. Never again.

But if the wizened elderly were in fact seeds ready for a new planting, ready for a new life, still the essential them, but re-made for a new dawning world, all the losses on this side of things would be OK.

Slices of bread – 1

Being an excerpt from my new book about how to simplify your life and find what really matters.

So my second lockdown project was to spawn a new book about how serious illness led me to slim down and perk up my life. Here’s the cover.

On the grounds that everyone is entitled to my opinion, I’m planning to serve up a few extracts over the summer weeks. Here’s the opening salvo.

Bread

My search for what really matters (part 1)

We should reckon on 30,000 days in our lifetimes – 82 years. After that (if even we get that far) we will find ourselves mostly filling our days fending off the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law of Thermodynamics roughly means everything breaks, nothing lasts, order breaks down, we’re all going to die. Nothing in the Universe pushes back for long against the Second Law.

Thirty thousand days puts a cap on how many of anything we will do: how many books or boxsets we can enjoy, or create, how many cities we can live in, how many hot dinners we’ll have. We’ve got one ration of weddings, birthdays, weekends away, meals out, drinks with friends, quiet nights in, or moments to tell someone we love them. We’ve got a few decades to serve in a career or two, and perhaps raise some children. It might feel it will go on forever. It won’t, and in a hundred years we will all be dust and so will those we love.

If you feel any of these:

  • Life is passing me by
  • I’m not doing what I want to do
  • I’m not happy
  • I’m wasting my days

This book is for you. I’ve kept it short, because, hey.

It’s a personal story of discovery. My background is some years of life-and-death medical adventures, including my death in 2011 (reversed by electric shocks to the heart) and a four-week coma in 2013. People who spend a long time in Intensive Care end up paralyzed, so during the year and a half after 2013 I had to learn again how to eat, swallow, walk and go to the toilet.  Eventually I put the wheelchair in the garage and resumed a life that feels, at the time of writing, restful, purposeful and happy. I still may have thousands of days unused if I’m, as my dad says, ‘spared.’

Life is the opposite of the countryside in that you see the widest views at the lowest points. I think most people learn things about themselves during adversity. I had time to ask questions like ‘What am I for?’ and ‘What am I hoping for?’ and ‘What I am spending my time on?’

I found answers that are good enough for me. I think they are the lessons everyone learns, but those of us who have been force fed these things through medical events, perhaps, are forced to face them quicker. I found them simple enough and roughly these:

  1. Suffering helps us focus on what really matters and can stop us heading down dead-end paths in the quest for fame, success or respect.
  2. Belonging is key to long-term thriving.
  3. So is purpose.

This book, them, is about how to simplify your life, and how to make you less restless, more content and more productive. I hope it helps. None of it is complicated. Some of it will happen to you anyway. Maybe this book will help you recognize and cooperate with the ripening and mellowing that is already underway in your life.

More next week, if you can bear the tension.