Imagine a room.  A box-like room. You sit in one corner of the room. You can see, on the room’s opposite side, a nozzle that protrudes from the wall. And from this nozzle, a gas begins to seep.

A thick gas. Viscous, noxious, self-evidently toxic. Will the gas stay where it is, or will it fill the space between and before you? Before you can blink or pause to ask, you see it seep forth. Flexing its rivulets, feeling into expanse. You see a cloud, but the cloud is merely an illusion, with the reality being billions of atomistic molecules careening off one another.

Now, the gas could stay where it is; just stop in place, hanging indefinitely like grapes in a flash-freeze.

But this is unlikely. Almost impossibly unlikely.

We have two macro states here: one, in which the gas stays in the corners, safely ensconced, and a second, in which soon the gas engulfs all the room’s space, including that within your lungs. So why is the former of much greater probability?

Because there are a radically higher number of microstates – meaning possible arrangements of molecules – that could represent the room-filling microstate than arrangements that would represent the former.

Entropy is not merely disorder, but instead the quiet arithmetic of nature. Where more microscopic arrangements correspond to a state, entropy is higher.

 Systems drift toward states that can exist in the greatest number of ways. In an isolated system, like our room, entropy increases over time. States move from the less probabilistic to the more probabilistic.

There are more ways for the gaseous constellation to fill the room than for it not to; therefore, the gas will fill the room. And ultimately your lungs too.

The gas is not merely gas; it is entropy itself. And entropy is the condition that spells, as clear as moonlight on rippling water, your inevitable demise.

The human body is the most extraordinary system of ordered articulation: so improbably arranged that its existence borders on miracle.

From the moment of inception, we exist within systems that tend toward disorder. And the only reason we exist at all is through extraordinary other systems of order that weave first existence and then continuity.

Brains and lungs and digestion; skin and blood and respiration. Unfathomably complex systems working in perfect unity. And at the front end, a felt sense of Being. An interested self, oriented toward self-interest, that sits in the chair and watches as that cloud encroaches.

You, as the experiencer of entropy, tasked with saving yourself from entropy.

Evolution seems to proclaim, “A system with a unified felt sense of me-ness is more motivated to tend to its own continuation”.

It is only through extraordinarily complex systems of information accrual, filing and transferral that we are here at all, of which you are yet another layer laid on top.

Systems of creation: attraction. sex. fertilisation. gestation. DNA. cell duplication. osmosis. Impossibly complex systems, working in successive harmony to beat back the dissolving forces of entropy. Creation of you, but creation also of

Systems of protection: parents. laws. norms. habitats. trust. shelter. thought. intuition. Stacked systems prediction, insulation, and restriction, tending toward the ultimate end of safety. And it is safety which enables

Systems of maintenance: dialysis. respiration. digestion. excretion. cognition. All chugging and churning, tugging and burning, whilst we at the front end occupy ourselves with learning.

How we can better protect; how we can better ensure safety; how we can jostle ourselves through sophisticated human systems, to best position ourselves to participate in systems of creation and contribute to – rather than solely exist within – systems of protection.

Extensive effort is exerted toward preventing systems unravelling, whilst forever we sit in the knowledge that someday they will. Entropy eventually overwhelms all resistance, and the great unravelling begins.

Luminous ribbon unspooling; stitched sutures unseaming; lithium batteries entering chemical runaway. Entropy always wins.

And yet, even as we watch that gas creep toward us, we scheme and writhe and formulate plans to escape.

We move and leap from the plume’s stalking stillness. But someday we’ll get tired.

We hyperventilate, to allow for longer breath holds. But you can’t hold that breath forever, and no amount of pre-huffing will change that.

We fashion new technologies to try to limit its progress. Diesel-powered leaf blowers to blow it back; biologically engineered filtering plants that cleanse and reset; or N95 masks that block and bury. Something, anything, to stem entropies’ flow. But so the flow continues, and our defences fall short.

Given the fullness of eternity, our leaf blowers will run out of fuel, the plants which once protected us will someday die, and our N95 masks will become irreparably clogged.

As a species, we are rapidly extending our lifespans. We’re devising ever-cleverer ways to sidestep entropy. But while stuck inside this closed system of a room, this is not a fight we can sustain forever.

One solution remains: get out of the room. Slip out of the bounds of this universe where the Second Law of Thermodynamics exists and escape the fate which entropy has laid out for us.

Some believe this to be possible. I am certain they’re wrong. It’s not a question of science, but instead of self-conceptualisation.

Self is an emergent property of layered complex systems. We are suspended and paralysed in the same breath that we are made anew by the myriad systems that continually give rise to being.

The origins of consciousness remain a mystery, and perhaps pure awareness can break these confines of time and space. But the self – your felt sense of I – is far too fallible to do so. Illusory, temporal and slippery, in escaping this confined system of universe, I’m certain there wouldn’t be anything stable of you to take along the ride of escape velocity.

When these complicated systems that constitute me cease to compute and coalesce, I sit with great certainty that Iwill cease to be.

And consciousness without I is not me at all; it is merely suchness.

This is not a bad thing, for suchness is itself isness. But we do arrive at a paradox. An ultimate conclusory paradox.

We must exist as the arbiters of self-preservation, knowing full well that this self will not be preserved. An impossible task thus placed at our feet.

Find stillness, meaning, happiness, joy, and solace, whilst sitting in the certitude that some day you will cease to be.

A forsaken situation. A Sisyphus-ian assignment.

As the atoms that constitute Self race toward dispersion and dissolution, watch them drift away, and try and smile whilst they do so.

This is the central conflict of the human experience. How to exercise sufficient effort to sustain self, whilst continually getting ready to say goodbye to yourself.

A paradox? Certainly. A cruelty? Maybe.

But maybe not.

It calls for a reframing. An evolutionary-dictated mad-dash toward resolution and infinite life, traded out for wonder, kindness, gift, and gratitude.

My youngest brother frames food and sustenance beautifully. As medicine, as giver, of gift to all the incredible systems of bacteria that form your gut. As foundation, as fuel, as fire to the fibres of your cells.

It’s not about living better to try and live forever; it’s about living better to have the best go at being whilst you’re here.

Your body is not a temple, nor is it a theme park. Your body is infinite systems stacked on systems, from which further and more interesting systems emerge. Your body is a miracle.

Your life is not a movie, nor are you the main character. You are the screen on which it is projected. You have sat there, still, for all of eternity, just waiting for colour, majesty, synchronicity, and miracle to dance across your surface. And now they are.

Life not as death march, but as unfolding through dance.

Just watch. Watch and listen.

And then weave.

Weave ideas back and forth like sugars across permeable membranes.

Weave facets of personality, teased out through vulnerability, through your fingers with curiosity, then twirl them back into an integrated self.

Enlightenment resides in knowledge. Knowledge as experience, received then embodied, but never retained. Like light projected onto stretched canvas. Simultaneously suspended and returned.

I know this place, I smile. And so do you.

We’ve always known this place.