House of Hazel Newsletter: Risk

July 14, 2020

On Sunday I went on a long bike ride so I could go in the ocean and spend time on the beach. While the ocean can be a source of calm and grounding, Sunday's tides were also chaotic, unpredictable, and strong. After the long ride, I waded into the water only to have my feet pulled out from under me and my body dragged into the sand. 

We generally have two levels of risk assessment in our lives. First, we assess what feels risky. Everyone has their own personal upper limit of what feels safe and what could be deemed a risk. Next, we assess what risks we are willing to take. Again, this is a personal range where we individually decide our upper limit of risks worth taking.

Often our sense of risk is bordered by things that are out of our control or are, perhaps, unpredictable, unfamiliar. Within the realm of the uncontrollable there is a sense that order may mitigate risk. Our desire to create and maintain routines can be an attempt at imposing order over what is truly natural chaos. 

In the words of Rev. Althea Spencer Miller, PhD, "Non-uniformity is as natural as the air we breathe... In all of history order has never been sustainable. It repeatedly succumbs to chaos. Order has often been aligned with repressions. It's been a way of commandeering and regulating the will of the people against their best interests. It's often un-accommodating of difference."

The second law of thermodynamics states that “as one goes forward in time, the degree of disorder (net entropy) of any isolated or closed system will always increase (or at least stay the same)." What is interesting about this is that an organism's internal disorder (disorder = entropy) can be decreased through an *increase* in surrounding disorder. Put simply: surrounding disorder creates internal order. Similarly, if an organism is surrounded by a complete lack of entropy (i.e. "perfect" order,) the organism's entropy will increase exponentially and it will eventually decay into a formless mass. 

We may crave the stability of having our feet solidly on the ground, a firm grip on an orderly and predictable future. Is it possible that that desire itself is, in fact, an internal steadying and stillness in the midst of entropic realities? By even imagining the order we seek, we are honoring the chaos around us, and balancing our own natural entropy. 

Today I am bruised and sore from Sunday's bike ride and ocean tumbles. In remembering the feeling of riptides yanking my feet from the ground, I realize that the moment of being suspended underwater was perhaps the moment of my greatest safety. The solid ground was arguably the biggest threat in terms of potential injury. The surrounding chaos of waves required me to orient myself, yield to what I could not control, and trust that the ground would rise up beneath my feet and not my head. Of course, it could have been different. A risk worth taking is still a risk. 

As the unknown continues to widen, may your risks be worthy and your entropy offer dreamed realities of sustainable equilibrium. 

With love, 

beccalove