The lake is dry, water is frozen.
Can't get wet without exerting extra effort.
A reminder that even the things that come easy are bound to get hard with time.
Or it's vice versa. Ice melts back to liquid form.
Overflowing force of nature pushes everything downstream only for them to be pulled upstream by the unseen hand of the cycle itself.
The idea is often that changing states of matter have an inherent instability and that instability mirrors the way our own lives shift, quietly at first, then all at once, until the familiar becomes foreign and the difficult becomes natural again.
It seems logical to nod at the perception that we operate in straight lines: effort → result. The truth is closer to a loop. Across a longer time frame, nothing holds its form for long.
Nowadays, the timeframe seems much shorter to me. For example, skills I thought were permanent can turn rusty after just a few months of neglect.
The scientific term is entropy. I like to interchange it with atrophy, even though I've understood that they're not quite the same thing.
Entropy as a slow march toward disorder is the common explanation, but it misses something important.
It's more nuanced in practice.
In a closed system, entropy always increases. Living systems, like ourselves, however are not closed.
One can temporarily create order, such as form habits and eventually master skills by consuming energy. This is our "frozen" state, which is arbitrarily stable, structured, and seemingly permanent.
But that order is borrowed, not owned. Because the moment we stop putting in the energy, the natural tendency toward a higher entropy state, or a more "liquid" and less predictable form, resumes.
Water only pretends to be still. Ice, solid and dependable, betrays its rigidity the moment warmth grazes it. It never really planned to stay frozen or rather it held no allegiance to its form; simply responding to its environment.
And isn't that what we do?
There are seasons where everything feels locked in place. Nothing goes right or wrong. Progress slows to a crawl, motivation dries up, and the things we used to do effortlessly suddenly demand force and discipline.
We must not complain or be at a loss for how things have changed, lest we forget that change is the only constant.
Not too long after, other seasons arrive unannounced, some with momentum so strong that all you can do is move with it and get swept up in the flow.
Almost everybody experiences periods of low-entropy, high-order creation when energy input pays dividends and everything clicks.
The mistake is believing this state is permanent, which most things tend to be guilty of doing.
Stability is just slow motion change. We're always in transition, even when it can't be felt.
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