CHAOS THEORY AND ORDER

Once upon a time I spent a month in a room with a bunch of surgery residents, led by a big blond bearded resident named Andrew. It was supposed to be a month to learn about trauma, but at the time, the only staff on service was one very tired overworked man who was either in his office or the OR, and a don't remember a case that wasn't related to scut. I do remember the room where we, the surgery team,  congregated and occasionally slept in, on couches and in chairs, late at night, interruptedly. Mostly I remember conversations led by Andrew.

 You'd think that I would remember a gruesome case or medical teaching, but the only two things I remember about the rotation was about this resident; first that he knew he would marry his wife on their second date, and that he was somehow finding the time to read a book called The Web of Life, by Fritjof Capra.

Long after I bought the book with the intention of reading it, a movie came out called The Butterfly Effect. The film was a mind bender, and a tiny element of the science of understanding complex systems and Chaos theory was introduced in its simplest metaphor; a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world and it effects the weather across the globe. It's always been the problem of time travel. How do you change one things without impacting others.  I suppose I hope karma works a little like this. We don't see the direct effect, but the good deed done will have one, and if enough occur, the world, somewhere for someone becomes a better place.

Lately, though, the overwhelming feeling I have is an expanding swath of chaos in my life, simply described in Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics as Entropy. This feels like chaos, but it is a simple description of things falling apart, or expanding to maximum randomness. My house gets messy in this way. My life spins this way too. Attempts at creating order only manage to right some of these things falling apart, and over the years, I wonder if the energy necessary to reverse entropy is really ever going to equal its unrelenting existence. If so, what can be done about it?

Another big clean shaven man I knew better talked of his years of post secondary school drawing to a close after two undergrad degrees and on his second post grad. He used the verb synthesize. I have for many years thought I would like to reach that point also, but after all this time I still feel that I am forever in the learning trajectory. Perhaps I have not learned well, or perhaps synthesis is an ideal I will never achieve. Nonethless, I feel that I must at least summarize what I have learned to present.

So I declare this year (although I readily admit it may not be done in one year) a consolidation year.  I encourage you to fight entropy smarter, and look at your systems more globally. After all, a 28 year old woman named Mrs. Isabella Beeton wrote a thousand page Book of Household Management before dying in childbirth. Surely a year is enough time to consolidate your life to date!