Castles

     Everything washes away.  Entropy is worked into the fabric of the universe.  That's not just a philosophical concept, either, but a scientific fact.  Physicists tell us that there will not only be a day when everything we know of the world is gone, but the universe itself will dissolve into aimless, drifting particles.  The good news is that before that day, we may have entropy pulling things apart, but we also have a tendency for things to come together.  There are forces at work that take up disassembled bits and reconstruct new things from them, recycling the world over and over.  Today's mountaintop may one day be part of the ocean floor, or the other way around.  Last year's flowers may feed this year's sprouts- if they weren't converted to butter by some helpful cow.

     It goes without saying that humans play a role in this continual reshuffling of the deck.  We all have an urge to build.  Putting things together, literally and figuratively, is what brought us to where we are today.  It's what drives the artistic process as I mentioned in a previous post.  But what's the point, you may wonder.  If it's all going to wash away, why bother?  Is it all just so much noise before we fade away?

     When you were a child, you may have visited a beach once, brought your pail and shovel or made do with hands and sticks.  You mounded and carved the sand.  You built up towers or bridges and decorated them with whatever was handy- leaves, shells, rocks.  For a while, all your focus was on making the best castle you could.  When you stepped back, you could see the good you had created.  In your heart, though not likely consciously, you knew it was worth the time and struggles, in part because there was joy in the creation, too.  If waves were threatening, you might worry that your work would be undone, but you knew it wasn't meant to stand forever.  Everything washes away.

     Over the years, I've lived in some places that were falling apart in various ways.  I've lived in places that were cramped or ugly, and it would have been easy to do nothing to improve my lot.  Little measures I could try wouldn't do much.  There would always be something else falling apart, more problems to take the place of the ones I fix.  I'd never be able to make it as nice as I'd like, and I wasn't planning on staying in those places forever.  But I still fixed what I could, sometimes working very hard to make significant repairs.  I still tried to paint and decorate on a limited budget knowing that it would never be perfect, knowing that the good I did would wash away some day.  Permanence was not required.

     Mankind has a need to work against the entropy.  The act of building our sand castles is the heart of it, the doing and not the object.  We are alive and eternal in that moment of doing.  What comes after doesn't make a difference, because we all know that everything washes away.

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