On adversity and entropy [reflections during a train trip from Madrid to Sevilla, taken 5/24]

Many times, I have attempted to discern the “purpose” of adversity. I´ve taken in others’ thoughts on the matter, and spun my own theories. My latest interpretation begins with the idea that a teleological approach is incorrect.

What if suffering is simply a by-product of phenomena like ignorance, power differences, inexperience, entropy, strong will, etc.? What if it is a mechanical function, a sort of experiential chemical reaction? As well as a result, suffering can certainly be a catalyst, the way a wave on the sea could buoy you, topple a boat, or simply shimmer in the sunlight and subside before an audience of wind, seabirds and fish.

If I take it down to the roots, adversity bothers me because of its omnipresence, its versatility, because it reminds me of the structure of life. This structure is mostly (or completely) implacable and operates many levels above the concerns of a simple creature like me. Perhaps adversity is a permanent, active force, whether we are aware of it or not, and we constantly respond to this force. Thus we “learn”, “age”, “grow”, “decay”, and so on.

This is not to say that adversity is without purpose. Rather, the significance we usually give to it (such as “learning from my mistakes”) might be misplaced. Maybe personal phenomena such as those I mentioned above are also mechanisms - artifacts of the system. Certainly a lot of my life has felt - to borrow from the existentialists again - absurd. I fight to master a concept for the satisfaction it gives me...but what does this mean? I fight for romantic attention - rarely, because it feels so petty, so tragically ludicrous, an arbitrary embrace of games that multiple in complexity the longer one engages them. I fight to remedy a perceived error or mishap, or I castigate myself for the same to some obscure spiritual end, primarily because it angers me to be reminded of my helplessness.

Adversity - but let’s go ahead and conflate it with entropy - is something I fight in an effort to “reorder” my existence. I wish to reverse chaos, to reassert my illusion of control. I, not chemistry or math or astronomy or God, write my story (equation).

It seems to be within my power, such as I perceive it, and therefore my “rights” to pretend in this way. If life is a naturally-occurring function, then the meaning of life is the pen knife with which I carve my initials into its argument. I remind this natural law and others who participate in it around me of my will.

This: the meaning of life may be the exercise of will, not necessarily the working out of purpose or salvation or escape. Only: here are walls, gates, a ceiling; here are knotholes, loose floorboards, jutting nails; here is a creaking shutter that bangs in the morning breeze, a sun-warped window view of mountains, a planter hanging lopsided off of the wrap-around porch which leans one shoulder off of the banister to pour a bit of its earth and herbiary in a slow, daily waterfall to the ground beneath it. Here are all these things, and here am I to touch them, push them, yell at them, kiss them, urinate on them.

I leave a mark, and maybe that is all that “the meaning of life” means. Here there be things, and I want to see and smell myself on these things. I am the dragon...even if life is really the dragon.