OPINION:
This week a thoughtful, handsome (1), thin (2) man communicated with me from the past. This great human reached forward across 10 full months and made my life easier. That person was me. His gift was rolling up the Christmas tree lights so they were easy to put up. A year ago, he could have thrown them in the decorations box in a big ball. He could have let entropy have its way. Instead, he did the right thing and wrapped them around a piece of card with some slits in it. Entropy is defined as the measurement of degree of randomness or in other words, it is the increase in the disorganisation within a system. Your lights will tend to tangle if energy isn’t applied to stop them from doing so. Professor of Engineering Dynamics and Vibration at Cambridge University, Hugh Hunt, put it this way, in a 2017 interview with The Naked Scientists.
There’s one organised way to have your lights, there are many, many ways to have your lights in a disorganised way. The odds are, that they’re not going to stay organised for very long unless you take enormous steps to make sure they do.
The universe doesn’t care if your lights end up in a horrible screwed up unsolvable mess. It’s all the same to the cosmos. The only entity with an emotional investment in the state of those lights is your future self. The one who has to untangle them.
Our past selves are often good to us. Maybe they did the shopping so there is something in the fridge to eat. They might have worked hard to get a house, so you have a roof over your head. Perhaps they ordered a bunch of socks and jocks a year ago, so you can put something comfortable and hole free on in the morning. When I am 65, I look forward to thanking my past self for setting up and paying into my kiwi saver. In two months time when I have a six-pack, huge pecs and tight buns I’ll look back and thank myself for finally getting around to signing up for the gym next week or the week after.