Entropy and the Breath Between Life and Death
The Physics of Decline, and the Fight to Live Meaningfully
The Art of Becoming is about turning obstacles into opportunities.
Drawing from philosophy, resilience, and real-life experiences, I share lessons on navigating adversity, cultivating wisdom, and living with purpose.
Life isn’t about avoiding hardships. It’s about becoming someone who thrives in it.
We won’t always have the answers, but we can search for them together.
I hope you’ll join me.
Life is a brief flicker of light.
Between our first and last breath is the poetry we call life. But entropy—the child of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics—makes sure that poetry doesn’t last.
Life begins safe, warm, and quiet.
We are cradled in the warmth of our mother’s womb, forming from a single idea into a fertilized egg—and then, nine months later, into a seven-and-a-half-pound body kicking against the placental wall.
From birth, we become agents of entropy—part of the chaos and destined to be broken by it.
Like the Titan Chronos of Greek mythology, who devoured his children whole, we are entropy’s children—fated to suffer disorder, pain, and struggle until the moment death kisses us goodnight.
The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is simple: as an isolated system, the entropy of the universe increases over time. It doesn’t pause. It doesn’t reverse. It doesn’t care. Given enough time, every system—organic or mechanical, biological or political—will eventually fall into chaos.
Entropy is the slow disintegration of order. The inevitable unraveling of structure. It is the law beneath every wrinkle on your skin, every empire that falls, and every career that eventually ends in a whisper rather than a bang.
Whether I knew it or not, I’ve spent most of my life reacting to this law. I believed I could control the chaos—outwork it, outfight it. I tried to ride it like a wave. And for a time, it looked like I was in control.
But that lie didn’t last long.
You ride one wave, maybe two, and then you realize it’s an ocean of waves—50, 60, 100-foot walls of water barreling toward you. And eventually—no matter how strong, how talented, or how lucky you are—every wave catches up to you.
I learned one of life’s hardest lessons: As the universe moves toward disorder, so do our lives.
“Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.”
—Vaclav Havel
And yet we struggle against it.
We are born into a well-ordered system designed for survival. Our bodies, a miracle of evolutionary design or cosmic mistake, function as near-perfect machines.
And for a while, the heart pumps. The lungs fill. The mind, a galaxy of over 86 billion neurons, can recall memories from decades past and find answers that the universe hid for 14 billion years.
There is elegance in this system—until there isn’t.
One day, we’ll fall and break a hip. We will forget the names of our children. Or our cells mutate and become cancer. It is entropy rearing its ugly, naked head in our bodies. These new regressive cells compete for space with the rest of the body. Left unchecked, cancer always wins.
For some, the battle starts early. Children born with chronic illness or neurological disorders come into the world already locked in battle with chaos. The disintegration of their lives begins early and ends fast.
We stumble when we see the poetry between their first breath and their not-too-distant last breath.
A quiet holiness wraps around their struggle. And we try to capture it, but we never do. It is too sacred for us to hold.
In exchange for the pain they carry, the universe imbues them with an honest understanding we will never touch.
From their memory, we call upon a strength forged in the fire of their suffering and disorder. And we pray we can carry that strength to our not-too-distant last breath.
The simple story of our lives is this: We are born. We live. And then we die.
But the complexity and beauty of that story lie somewhere in between. We call that story life.
It is our first love. And last. The day we raced to the hospital to see the birth of our first child. And did it again for our second. The story continued when our parents died and made us orphans, even as adults. Our lives broke when we said goodbye to our last love. And it ended with no regret on the last page of our story.
For others, entropy arrives quietly.
It hides behind back pain, memory loss, and a heart that beats slightly too fast or not quite fast enough. It’s the creaking knees, the graying hair, or the subtle erosion of vitality.
One day, you wake up and realize the energy you had for all things now comes at a cost.
“I kept a diary right after I was born.
Day 1: Tired from the move.
Day 2: Everybody thinks I am an idiot.
- Steven Wright
There is poetry between the space of our first and last breath. Or at least there is supposed to be.
That poetry is supposed to rhyme, to have meaning. To dance and make love on the back porch during a rainstorm. To make a wish come true for a dying child. To hold your mother’s hand on her 100th birthday. To beat a drum on Kilimanjaro, drink sake with the Dalai Lama, play poker with the Pope, and chase the love of your life naked on a beach—and smile when they let you catch them.
We are supposed to burn bright and fast. To scream into the hurricane and dare it to come closer.
And while we are rhyming, finding meaning, dancing, and making love, we will struggle. But we are meant to smile when it comes.
Most of us are pretending. We surrendered to entropy long before it swallowed us. We settled.
We fail to see the poetry between our first breath and last. That is, until it’s too late. All we can do is say goodbye and pray for forgiveness for a life we barely lived.
Bruce Lee said:
“Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick.
After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick.
Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.”—Bruce Lee
Now I understand what I’m supposed to do.
When I was young, I believed I could outfight entropy.
Then I grew wiser and realized no one can.
Now that I am older, I know the truth.
No one can outfight or outrun the chaos inside.
But you can certainly try.
Everything has an ending, and entropy will have its way.
Your body will fail. The systems will break. Your story will end. But somewhere between your first breath and the last, you still get to choose how to live.
You can settle—or you can resist.
You can go quiet—or you can scream into the hurricane and smile when it answers back. You won’t outrun the chaos. But maybe you don’t need to.
Maybe the point was never to win.
But maybe the point was simply to try.
A question for you to ponder:
What poetry are you going to write that lies between your first breath and the last?
Thanks for reading. Run into the chaos.
Love to you and yours,
Michael
What a great treatise on life. Momento Mori!