Dealing with entropy

Or not dealing with it at all

The essays, books and notes, people and posterity document are as much my truth as those that find no record. Today’s Sunday offering is my canvas to write that unrecorded part of my truth. As with the other articles in this newsletter, this piece attempts to showcase the meaningful pulse of quotidian life in an impermanent world. I’ve tried to furnish my prose with the tenacity of a sleuth, waiting for the right moment to deliver that sometimes unapologetically sobering dose of reflection on life as I see it. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did writing it.

by Heather W Ernst

There are many ways to rehabilitate the human spirit but most of them treat the symptoms and not the illness itself. The remedies we self-prescribe often revolve around a need to reinstate a sense of permanence in an impermanent world, which of course is no crime in itself. It is after all the unspoken contract we have with the material realm as it gradually veers through the gates of inevitable oblivion.

We clutch onto our old photographs armed with a bagful of vignettes. We cling to that old watch or frayed wallet long after it has fallen apart and duly served its worth. The cream white picket fence of a childhood home. The familiar blend of eclectic aromas from a homecooked dish. We crave for that residual magnetism in an object or experience long after its force has been removed. We savour its memory even when our object of fixation has vanished and left no tangible trace of itself. But like a missing limb, it continues to exert its phantom presence.