It’s Water, Don’t Try To Fight It

Last Thursday I came home to find water pooling in my closet. It was dripping, strangely enough, from the air conditioning unit above the vent in the ceiling of my closet. It was a terrible tragedy that dragged on through the entire Labor Day Weekend until Tuesday, when our handyman Ken finally fixed it. He's got dozens of aging units to care for and, as far as I can tell, no one to assist him. It's like some weird synthesis of Hercules and Sisyphus, constantly waging war against entropy like that. My parents did it with old cars when I was a kid, so I have a reverence for that kind of losing battle. It is maddening to fight against the tendency of things to break down, and I admire the tenacity and commitment to mental illness necessary for such work.

Sometimes I feel that's what life is about, tenacity and mental illness in dealing with certain inevitabilities. And having been raised Presbyterian, the Calvinist in me thinks that all things are inevitable, and everything happens or does not happen just exactly as it is supposed to. I don't know if I can or want to accept such an orderly universe, but watching the water drip from the ceiling to the shelf to the bucket over and over, I couldn't help but think that entropy is one of those inevitabilities, and with entropy comes the flavor, if not meat, of chaos and I find that somewhat comforting. I am trying to find comfort in the idea of an orderly universe running on a straight track just as it is supposed to, but I'm not there yet. Maybe I'll get there in this lifetime.

I wish I could say for certain.