Things are always moving towards chaos. It’s a law.

Not just a law from a government, it’s a science law. Like Gravity. It is not appealable. It is as solid and inevitable as fate.

I know my life has felt like chaos during for the last two years. But this law in its proper language doesn’t call it chaos. It’s called entropy.

I just encountered that word in Flow—Csikszentmihalyi used the term “psychic entropy.” What a combination of words! It sounds like a name for a super villain. But the term is used to describe negative mental efforts—a chaotic state of mind.

To be more specific, the opposite of psychic entropy is controlled attention. The ugly head of a pandemic has captured my attention. It seemed to control my attention in a way that was hard to escape.

But it did not add to my life. Flow put a definition to this “If one chooses a trivial goal, success in it does not provide enjoyment.” The goal of getting through a pandemic alive is a very trivial goal. The kind of experience I’m trying to get back into—what is called flow experiences— “are just as real as being hungry, or as concrete as bumping into a wall. There is nothing mysterious of mystical about them…the self that is part of it expands its boundaries and becomes more complex than it had been” (pg 65)

I am hungry for this expanding soul. And I am running into the wall of entropy. Devolution. I really want to grow.

But I can change the direction of the entropy. I can take the psychic energy at my disposal and shift it towards expansion. I’m supposed to be complicated and I love it.

This stupid narrowing of all attention on one topic squeezes me out of my interestingness and enjoyment in life.

I did not come here to go small and rigid. This life is too rich to shrink