Falling Apart

It was that sort of evening.  I was planning on getting to bed at a Ben-Franklin-approved healthy-wealthy-and-wise hour.  I'd read until fatigue took me, and turned in as the rest of the family still puttered about the house.  It was nice and neat and just so, an evening that followed the natural order of household evenings.

But just as I reached REM sleep, our dog started having another seizure and fell down the stairs.  Which we were trying to deal with, when my older son announced that he was starting to feel lousy, and lo and behold, he was running a pretty substantial fever.  Ack, we went, running around as our orderly expectations came apart.

From order to chaos, in less than ten minutes.

Existence, or so we are told, bends towards disintegration.  Chaos is, we hear, the very state and nature of the universe.  Order degrades, and all descends to entropy.  Things fall apart, as the recently deceased Chinua Achebe reminded us.  The universe is slowly, surely, declining, as columnist Michael Gerson wrote in a particularly reflective recent op-ed.

These things are true, and feel ever the more true as the years progress.  Few things remind you more of the gradual degeneration of being from order to disorder than your arrival at midlife, as your body aches and sags and creaksaround.

Yet in the face of that, there's the reality of life.   Not my own life, but life itself, as we can observe it.  Life seems to drive fiercely and intentionally in the opposite direction.  Life moves from complexity to complexity, growing ever deeper and more sophisticated as it grows and evolves and adapts.  From random bitlets of protein to cells to multicellular organisms to social organisms, from the flail-around-till-a-mutation-sticks adaptive spamming of evolution to the intentionality of sentience, life shows a peculiar trend towards more and more elegant systems, as it tacks hard through the waters and winds of chaos.

Life moves, as it moves, against the flow of the second law of thermodynamics, in ways that appear to be non-random.  It is being, standing in relation to being, seeking cohesion and order and continuity and memory.  And knowledge.  And will.  And personhood.

It is possible, I suppose, to consider sentient life as an anomaly, just a swirling eddy in the great current of entropy.

Or it could be something more.  Something that must be part of the system, and that arises from the great completeness of all being.

From purpose.   Or so it feels, even after those times when things have fallen apart.

Syria and the Strange Blessings of Chaos

I'll admit it.  I didn't watch the speech.  I rarely watch speeches, or speeches responding to speeches, which is a peculiar thing for someone who gets up and talks in front of folks on a weekly basis.  Perhaps it was all those years of dutifully watching State of the Union Addresses, which have soured me on political yammering.  Plus, I'm in the thicket of reading World War Z, and I'm not about to put down a page turner to listen to someone telling me something I already know.

In reading this morning's summations, Obama said, well, what I'd thought he was going to say.  My Fellow Americans.  Horror.  Pursue all options.  The strike is on the table.  International control of chemical weapons might stay our hand. For now. Justice, responsibility, international community.  God Bless America.

Honestly, though, in the mess that Syria continues to be, what has caught my attention the last day or so has been the peculiar way in which a potential resolution has manifested itself.   As this crisis has unfolded, one consistent theme has been the frustratingly amorphous response from the United States.

Here inside the Beltway, there was about a week of talking head handwringing about the scattershot and vacillating "messaging" from the Administration.  Where do we stand?  What's going on?  We seem to be going to war, and yet there seem to be a dozen different perspectives coming out of the White House.  It was maddeningly chaotic, disorganized, and seemingly at odds with itself.

This was perhaps most frustrating to Republicans, who found themselves without a clear thing to stand in opposition to.  How can you reflexively disagree with someone if they won't clearly tell you what it is that you don't believe?

And yet it had struck me as a frustrating but peculiarly appropriate response.  In times where the response is obvious and the path was evident, clarity and decisiveness is vital.  But this was not one of those times.  Faced with a situation with no clear outcome and no apparent "good" path, bold certitude is the response of a fool.  "I really have no idea of the implications of what I'm doing, but I'm going to commit to it completely" may appeal to folks who view the universe in binary terms, but nine hundred and ninety two point three seven five times out of a thousand that just takes you deeper into the [excrement].  On the side of that path lie the ruins of countless relationships, businesses, and nations.

So things moved slowly and circuitously, and direction seemed hard to discern.  The threat of a strike was clearly there, but the path towards it seemed unclear.  When?  How?  Huh?

Then, out of a vacillating thicket of seemingly contradictory policy statements, there came one that opened up a possible out for Assad.  Turn over your chemical weapons to international authorities, and this could be averted.   Suddenly, a brokered deal seems possible.  America's military engagement may yet be averted, and the core goal...preventing the use of chemical weapons...may be preserved.

"May."  It's not a sure thing.  Not by a long shot.  Syria is still a mess, and will be even if their sarin is secured by the UN.

But this week, there is suddenly an opening that was not there last week.   From a cloud of terrible options, a better path seems to have appeared.

And the strange irony is that in this instance, a seemingly chaotic response to a chaotic situation seems to have created the potential for order.

Sabbath, Chaos, and Control

As I continue on through Bill McKibben's difficult, disturbing Eaarth, my reflections on Maryann McKibben-Dana's (no immediate relation) book about Sabbath continue to echo about in my head.

One of the threads that repeated several times in that thought-provoking book was the idea of Sabbath as that place where we permit chaos to enter.  Sabbath becomes that place where we stop pouring ourselves into the structures that frame our lives, the schedules and demands and expectations that leave us continually anxious, ever behind, always stressed and struggling.  It is energy, not form.  It is freedom, not order.

I feel that, but I found myself wondering if it is something else.  A Sabbath day is not random, and it is not disordered.  It is free, yes, but when I take sabbath time...long meditative walks, times to write or draw, times to read and grow...they do not feel like chaos.  They feel calm.  They feel serene and ordered and at peace.

It's a different order.

The structure of sabbath matches the intent of creation.  Our crazy, competitive, acquisitive stresstival of striving does not.   It is a poor match for the Creator's intent.  It feels like chaos, or at least like a structure so poorly suited to change that it shakes us violently, tossing us about as it itself is tossed.

What does striving look like?  What does sabbath look like?  My mind went for visuals.   And as I thought that, I found myself drawing out an image from a movie, as I often do.   It was from the movie "Contact," a delightful bit of hard sci fi direct from the mind of dear ol' Carl Sagan himself.

In the scene, Jodie Foster is being sent to meet with extraterrestrial intelligences that have contacted humanity, in a device whose design has been provided by those intelligences.  Humanity has made one modification to that design:  the command chair in which she sits.

That chair, my metaphor-mind suggested, is our scheduled life.  And sabbath?  Sabbath arrives at the three minute mark of this little video snippet.