Entropy and the Laws of Life

I was thinking about how I’ve recently given my apartment a deep clean, and how I always struggle to keep it clean.  It made me think of entropy.

Yah, I know.  A little odd, but there you go.

Things that are organized have no stability; hence, the universe tends towards disorganization, as it likes stability.  How’s that for entropy made simple?

Sure, this is a nice and easy way to get out of cleaning my own apartment, but I’ve been thinking about this disorganization is stability concept.  How often have we tried to plan out an event only to have something go wrong?  Did we freak out about it, or just let it ride as the Universe righting itself?  Lord knows I’ve freaked out about events going awry – I was determined to have every single aspect of the event organized before the event.  Thinking about it further, I can’t think of any other way than saying I was trying to one-up the Universe.

How often have we tried to plan out a day, only to have it go horribly off track?  That’s certainly happened to me, more often than I can count.  Part of me cringes at the mere thought of an organized day going off track, but the mere derailment of an organized day doesn’t mean the day is lost – sometimes, it ends up better than originally planned, sometimes worse, but either way it’s the Universe kicking that organization to the curb.

Taking this even further, how often have we tried to plan out our lives only to have it go awry?

I’ve got a friend going through this turmoil right now – his life isn’t where he had planned for it to be, and it’s clearly causing him some pain.  I’ve certainly gone through that, as my quarter life crisis posts suggest from over a year ago.  I would say I’m out of that phase now.  I can’t say its anything active on my part, but I think a large part of it is acceptance that, yes, life won’t ever be organized to my desires, but a large part of that is clearly out of my control – gravity will pull the blocks down no matter how high I stack them, and liquids will always fit the shape of its container.

So maybe I shouldn’t really try to plan out the next few years of my life, the next few decades of my life.  Part of me is already anxious over that thought – odd, since I really don’t have any sort of plan, but the mere thought of not having a plan causes anxiety (now that calls for future exploration.)  Besides the inevitable anxiety over the plan, and anger when not meeting the plan, the universe is pretty clear that organization won’t last.

It’s easy to say I’ll just leave “it”, aka my life, up to the Universe, well, easy to type, but it seems extraordinarily difficult to actually believe and accept.  Accepting that your organization will inevitably fall like Newton’s apple means that you’re powerless.  And it’s not appropriate to feel powerless in our society.  It’s easy to fight against the Universe, and make grandiose plans on where you’ll be in ten years.  Easy to fight against, but impossible to win.

You have on the other hand, those that say the Universe helps those who help themselves.  Maybe the right method is to have a general direction of where you’d like to go without the specifics that you become too attached too.  But, then again, when running a business, how often do you need to have that specific plan for the long term.  But is there any such thing as long-term success in the corporate world?  Inevitably, all businesses will fail at some point – nothing’s permanent.  So while the short term (short term could even be on the order of decades and centuries mind you) needs a plan for corporate success, no long-term plan can cure that inevitable death (either corporate or human.)

For those with the continual five-year plans, I wonder how happy they are in comparison to those without detailed plans, but floating through the universe without a pile of blocks to be knocked over.  Because isn’t that the goal for all of us?  To find happiness, no matter what our definition of happiness may be?  If my blocks keep getting knocked down by the Universe in its desire for disorder but stability, I won’t be happy as I have to constantly restack them.

But maybe stability isn’t what everyone wants in life.  They want to stack up the bocks to get to their highest potential, and if the universe knocks them down, they find joy in rebuilding.  I’ve come to realize that stability means more to me then great heights.  [Part of this, I’m sure, was the severe instability of my childhood – and the desire to find stability for once.  (“My happy little ruts.”)]  I find comfort, and dare I say happiness, in the stability of my life.  Maybe I need to try to fight the Universe a little less often and try to listen to it more.

Brining UU to my world – YUUP – Young UU Professionals?

After another flurry of emails in my 20s/30s group about the large group of 40s, I’ve been thinking a lot lately on UU and my generation. We are busy – I’m really at the start of my generation, The Millennials, who start with those who graduated high school in 2000 which was my high school class, and continues for around 20 years. This suggests that have more I common with the kids in my youth group than their parents, which I’ve often thought. We’ve grown up on computers (we had a personal computer when I was 5) and the internet (which I had access to in the 4th grade – before the world wide web popped up for mainstream use. I got a computer and internet access through my school, who gave all of us fourth and fifth grades a computer and a modem with access to a chat service and a message board via Prodigy.) We’re accustomed to instant communication, either via the Internet or cell phones (I was among the last of my friends to get one, as a junior in high school in 1998.) We’re busy – we’ve had busy schedules planned out for us since birth. Even with my less than normal childhood, I still had the gambit of little league sports and scouts and once I hit high school I was involved with a dozen after school clubs.)

Now that we’re entering the workforce, we’re encountering a whole set of different kind of problems than what we’ve ever faced before. We’ve gone from having scripted lives to a less than stellar workforce where often our talents aren’t being utilized to our fullest potential…and that’s really the first time that’s happened to us. All our lives we’ve suffered from high expectations, either our own or our families’. And when we don’t live up to those expectations, we see it as a character flaw.

I know, I know. I can hear the eye rolling now. That happens to everyone at that age. Get over it.

We hear that a lot. Get over it. I’ve even heard it at church before. Maybe not those words specifically, but certainly the intent, and the eye rolling, has gotten across before, even in a small group setting which really set me off from the whole small group thing.

But it’s different. At least I think it is, but I’m hardly an objective observer.

I dealt with a lot of these issues a year or two ago, but they really just blindsided my best friend, and she’s having a really hard time coping with it all. Why is that we just can’t seem to be comforted by our faith?

We need to find a way to update Unitarian Universalism, to keep our faith alive and vibrant, not forgetting our past but not letting that past dictate where the future will go. I need a faith where I can practice without having to go on Sunday morning to get my fill. Where I can practice on a flight, going out drinking with friends, or even stuck in traffic. There has to be more ways of connecting with the universe without having to maintain an austere meditation schedule, or taking days off from work to go live in the woods (lord knows I want to, but I can’t take off days like that – I’m not at that point in my career yet.)

Another thing that’s on my mind is that the main crux of the former young adult planning was centered around conferences and retreats, where someone like me who doesn’t get a lot of time off work can go to, and from what I hear, are slightly more hippie than I’d like. I guess what I want is a UU group for Young Professionals, where we can learn to make sense of the workplace, without having to take a week off to discover ourselves. Maybe I should help start a group – YUUP – Young UU Professionals.

Paying it forward from the back of the plane

Sittin on the back of the plane,
Watchin’ the sky roll by,
Wooooo,
Sittin on the back of plane,
Wastin’ tiiiiiiiimmmmee.

So today I chose to sit in the back of the plane – I didn’t really want to sit by anybody, so when I was checking in using one of those computer terminals, I swapped to the back. After killing an hour in the Atlanta airport, it was time to board.

There was another tall guy like me, but his ankle was in a cast. He was hanging out in the back of the plane, trying to get a seat change (so he could fit.) I ended up having the whole 3 set row to myself – score. Right before the flight took off, a flight attendant tapped me on the shoulder. I removed my headphones, and she asked if I would mind changing to another aisle seat around me, so the ankle guy could lie down and stretch out. Being the recipient of prior flight attendant induced seat changing in my favor, I said sure. I got myself resituated in the seat behind mine, and he was mightily appreciative.

As we were rolling out, the tall ankle guy passed a note to the cute guy across the aisle. Thinking I was about to see an in flight hookup, I read it. It told him that the lady behind him with curly hair and the lady next to him were friends, and inquired if he’d be willing to swap seats with curly so they could sit together. He knew, as I did, that they were friends – they walked in together and were ticked off they were separated. Cute guy nodded, got the attention of the lady behind him (and across the aisle from me) and offered to swap…and she was thrilled. They swapped, and the cute guy was back by my side.

In front of the curly lady there was a mom who had, I would guess, a three-year-old girl with pigtails who wasn’t thrilled at having to sit down for the flight. She started crying. I started blowing bubbles, which got the kids interest, but curly lady really got her to quiet down with a little hand game, and they played throughout the take off. This calmed her down, and we didn’t hear a peep out of her for the rest of the flight.

Later in the flight, there was a crying infant who came back with her really tall father. Pigtails looked up, astonished to see someone her size on the plane. She looked at the crying infant, and started to wave at the infant who stopped crying as pigtails stood up to get a better look at the infant. They were locked in a trance for a couple of minutes, before her father continued on his mission to the back of the plane. I didn’t hear that infant cry again for the rest of the flight either.

I don’t quite know if the chain of paying it forward continued from there – who would that little infant pass it to back in the front of the plane after all– but it was pretty neat to see the chain happen in front of my eyes. Pretty nice sight from 28-D

Sharks and God

A kid in front of me was curious why there were sharks.  He asked god for the answer, and waited to “see if an answer came.”  He closed his eyes in a silent prayer, waited, and said “no answer came.”  He had the most serene look I’ve ever seen on a fifth grader’s face.

“I bet dinosaurs would eat people in heaven.  That’s why they’re probably down there.  I bet they have dinosaurs down there.”

I could tell a shift in my thinking occurred – before, I would tell the kid why he was wrong about the whole dinosaur thing, or that I could tell him why there were sharks and that he didn’t have to pray.  But when he was presumably asking for the answer, I saw a calmness spread across his face.

There’s nothing I could say that could justify taking that inner calmness away.

Delay in Houston

So I was sitting in the lobby of Hobby airport in Houston, a pretty darn small airport for someone used to Atlanta, a couple of weeks ago.  My flight was delayed an hour at the time of this writing.

There was a flight before mine that’s been delayed all day long, for the past 12 hours.  There was a technical problem, and the part needed to fix it is on my flight.  There’s a high school chorus of 45 kids going up to new york on that flight.  After articipating in many vrious boredom busters, they started to sing/practice for their concerts in new york.

I tuned out the CNN playing in the background and fosuces on the music.  The beautiful choral music produced by a group of 45 high schoolers who have been waiting in the hobby airport for the past 12 horus for their flight.

There choral music had a spirit behind me.  And whatever spirit they have after waiting 12 hours in a boring airport is more spirit than I have in my whole body.
And for those wondering where I’ve been – I’m out of town every other week for business now, flying to Dallas and Houston and Charlotte sometimes, and maybe Seattle soon as well.  Life’s just too busy to keep up with this on a regular basis, although I do have a couple of other posts hanging around my computer I’ll put up.

The most amazing week ever

This week has been one of the most emotionally draining weeks of my life, and I would argue that most non-death-related draining week of my life.  I went from questioning my faith, to having a crisis, to feeling pretty much hopeless, then having my faith reawakened and now it’s almost over powering.  This is a recap of this week.  It’s long, as a warning.

So my car broke down again…but this time…

So my car broke down again yesterday on the way to work…while I was talking on the phone with my grandma.  I slammed on my brakes to avoid running a yellow about to turn red, and I hear a pop, then my car starts to smoke.  Eek!  After the light turns green, I try to get it into a parking lot (it was a rather busy road – Peachtree Parkway) and I have to fight to get it to steer.  My prior experience tells me that something’s up with the serpentine belt.

I pop the hood, look under, and see that, well, part of that gray thing broke off, melted off more like it, and the belt wrapped around it.  That’s what I tell AAA on the phone as they dispatch a tow truck.  Triple A is the closest thing my mom has to a messiah figure in her life, and ordered I get it when I turned 25.  Glad I did!

Next up I call the boss, telling him clearly I will not be there in time, and may not even be in at all.  He later calls back, ordering me into work.  So I’m not entirely pleased with him at that point.

While I was waiting in the parking lot for AAA, I tried to look at this in a different light then the prior car troubles I’ve had.  I thought about what this was here to teach me.  I’ve learned, through listening to the Oprah Soul series on XM 156 that’s what she does when she has a crisis, and that was applauded by the Buddhist she had on with her.  So I thought, what could this be here to teach me.

Relying on my friends?  I started calling them up, sharing what happened.  I was worried that it would cost me a helluva lot of money, something that I couldn’t afford.  So I was hoping that some of my friends, if I asked for a loan, would grant it.  I called up a friend with two cars, who told me that I could borrow one….if I could drive a stick (nope!).  Lots of ears for me to vent to.  It was a nice feeling.

Humility?  I had the thought recently that my life is going great, and I was starting to pull myself up to a different level.  I was perfectly content, and even excited about how positive I feel and what the future holds.  Maybe this was happened to teach me to focus on the here and now, and that life’s just skating on thin ice…you never know what will cause you to break through.

Ego?  When my car started to smoke, I immediately worried what the other people thought, not worried for my car or how I would survive the workweek.  I was intrigued to notice that, and thought about that a lot.  When I was pushing the car towards the tow truck, I was doing fine by myself (Big Kinsi vs.  a Little Saturn….who’s gonna win?) but another guy jumped over to help anyways.  I thought for a brief second, “geesh, I got it” but then was overcome by gratitude.

The tow truck comes, with its female driver (I thought it was awesome.  You just don’t see a lot of female tow truck drivers) and she’ extremely nice and funny.  She said, as she looked under the hood, “Wow!  I’ve never seen that before.”  I replied, “well, glad to be unique.”  We tow it back to my suburb, about 15 miles away, to the tow shop close to me that I go to often.  I have to rent a car!  For the first time.  Midas promises me they’ll look at it today.  Enterprise comes and picks me up from the shop and we drive off to Enterprise.

I’m still in a somewhat shock-pensive stupor, and I find out they don’t have any smaller cars, and the cheapest in the area would be a pick-up truck.

See, I grew up in South Georgia.  I hate pick-up trucks and everything they stand for.  But, no choice, so I drove that F-150 megatruck back to work, and all around Atlanta (I had to travel a lot yesterday for work.)

A couple of more lessons popped into my head:

Humility part 2: I swore once I would never drive a pick up truck, yet here I am, driving one.  All of my friends found it pretty funny….some wanted a picture.  A big ol’ queen in a big ol’ pick up truck.  I had put myself above people who drove pick up trucks, who I apparently saw as inferior in some way because of what they drove.  I was shocked to discover that in myself…and I vowed to stop judging folks on the cars they drove.

Overwhelming Gratitude – I was overcome with gratitude, especially when the Midas guy called and told me I had two options.  The air compressor broke, so I could get air conditioning fixed and pay 800, or a different kind of belt with no AC for 85.  I’ll take the no ac option.  I got my car fixed for under a 100 dollars.  My friends were great, and so were my coworkers.  By the end of the night I just had a sense of overwhelming gratitude.

Sure, there were times yesterday when I was really irked.  When people asked how I was, I replied “horrible!”  So I’ve got a ways to go.  But maybe I am starting to become a little more spiritual in my life…and I think it’s worthwhile.  Last year I would have had a panic attack, this year I was much calmer, and now everything’s turned out fine (I returned the megatruck and picked up my lil’ Saturn this morning.)

Happiness at the corner of Peachtree and Peachtree Corners

I was sitting in traffic on the way to work, at the intersection of Peachtree Parkway and Peachtree Corners, and I started thinking about happiness.

What brought it on?  A few days ago I finished correcting the typos in my 1st real nanowrimo, 41 Sunflowers, the little story that could, I think, one day be published.  I wrote about a girl who I met online, who told me that she decided one day to be happy.  I was confused, so I asked for a little elaboration.  She said happiness was a choice, and she was choosing to be happy.  It stuck with me then, and for some reason on the way to work today I thought about it.  [And, yes, it was actually at that intersection where I hit...there really are that many peachtrees in the metro atlanta area.]

Is happiness a choice?

There are so many times when I’ve been depressed, and wallowed in it.  Too tired to get up out of bed, or to do anything other than read indulgences online.  Even went on generic prozac to try to fix it.  I’m out of that phase, but still not “happy.”

How could anyone be happy, when there’s so much badness and sadness in the world?  People are dieing everyday from war, from famine, from preventable causes.  People are suffering all over the world.  Global warming is going to kill us all, and the planet while we’re at it.  When I’m obsessively checking the news throughout the day, at least 5 times today, the headlines are all doom and gloom, the latest in a string of daily disasters.   Yet I’m horrified when I hear there are people who aren’t well informed, who aren’t watching the news 24/7.  How could anyone stand being ignorant of global problems?

I’ve seen ignorance as the number 1 evil in society, yet, is the adage true and ignorance is bliss?

If being exposed to the harsh realities of our shrinking society, and that causes pain and unhappiness, why wouldn’t I want to check out of knowing everything in reality.  Choosing ignorance over unhappiness.  Choosing ignorance over being a globally responsible citizen.  When I self-righteously criticize other people for being ignorant, and rally against it, am I criticizing the choice to be happy?  Yet being self-righteous and crizitie when people aren’t keeping up with the news isn’t making me happy.  It makes me even further sad that more people aren’t watching the news or angry about my issue of the day.  I’m sad over the news, then I get sadder that more people aren’t paying attention.

We talked about that issue in a small group a while back, and I found myself agreeing with the thought that an ignorant happiness is worse than an aware sadness.  What’s more important….being happy, or being globally aware?  I haven’t met a terribly large amount of people who are happy and in a state of global awareness.

Is happiness a choice?

How many times have I said, “I’m not an optimist, I’m a realist.”  Can I choose to look at a situation that just sucks, both globally and in my life, and instead of getting angryand/or sd about it, actively choose to be happy?

*Is* happiness a *choice*?

What should die inside me so that I might truly live?

Small group on Sunday was absolutely incredible.  We did a set on Easter via San Jose UU’s Small Group website (a wonderful resource.  I’d be lost without it!)  The first question was something to the affect of “What should die inside me so that I might truly live?”

It took a bit, but I came up with an answer.  I feel like I need to have all the answers.  To everything.  This plays itself out in a couple of ways

1) Work.  If a kid comes with some obscure chemistry question or a calculus question I haven’t seen in 5 years, and I don’t know how to do it and can’t figure it out, I leave work in an absolutely horrible mood. I feel stupid.  I feel extremely stupid.  My friends and coworkers can attest to this.  Its been made very clear to me by all of my bosses that I am not expected to know the answer to everything – I’m taking this on myself.  I feel like if I don’t know it, then I’m doing a bad job, and I don’t want to do a job if I’m bad at it.

2) Life.  I feel like I should know the answers to life’s big questions.  Why are we here?  How’d we get here?  Where am I going in life?  What will I do for the rest of my life?  I don’t know any of the answers, and its a source of anxiety for me.  I feel like I ought to know these by now, and I don’t, so there must be something wrong with me.  Yes, I know that it’s silly to think I should have all the answers, since no one ever has, but just because my brain knows it doesn’t mean my mind/soul/heart does.

I think part of where this comes from is that I was one of the smart kids in school.  I always “got it” even though sometimes I had to work my ass off to get it.   But now there’s no textbook to study for life’s questions, and it’s impossible for me to know everything about every single academic subject (if I did, I doubt I would be a tutor after all.)  I needed to have a lot of answers growing up as well.  After my dad died, my mom and sister fought all the time, and I was thrust into a situation where I was expected to have the answer and compromise that would pacify both of them and get them talking to each other again.

I need to work on killing this off so that I can be reborn in the Easter spirit.  I spend a lot of time worrying about not having all of the answers and it’s one of the many sources of my low self-esteem.  I might be missing out on life (or maybe this is life….I don’t know and that aggravates me.)

Not quite intellegent design

So in this period of questioning pretty much every single belief about life and myself that I have, I’ve thought about how we got here…kinda.

I see how there are so many things that had to be just right for us to exist on this planet.  I also wonder how this group of cells, no different than the cells on my couch or the smooshed bug on the wall, can hear itself think.  These cells go down to atoms.  How can a group of atoms hear itself think? DNA is so complicated, how can it have evolved naturally?

My friend P-cat told me I started to sound like I believed in intellegent design.  Not quite.

Because it’s SO complicated, I don’t see how anything could have designed it either.  I don’t see how something that is too complicated to possibly have evolved naturally to be designed by something either.  So I’m trying to think out that little catch-22 that’s presented itself.  Not naturally, not by design.  So I don’t have any flippin idea.

Quelle surprise.