I was browsing through the poetry collection, ‘Every Night Is Full Of Stars‘, with no particular object in mind beyond distraction when three lines of Tom Hirons’ poem ‘In The Meantime‘ helped me to name my restlessness.

“And we hold each other fast
Against entropy, the fire and the flood.

Life leans towards living”

I read the poem through a few times and recognised that I’ve been feeling the forces of entropy, small and large, pressing against me recently.

Little things like building maintenance or administration that seem always to need to be redone to prevent my life from sliding into chaos.

Personal things like dealing with the effects of aging now that I’m termed a geriatric by the medical profession: worsening eyesight, declining stamina, waning appetites, all the small assaults that harass and weaken us until they and we are finally ended.

Larger things like watching my country growing poorer and less kind as the billionaires work to bulldoze our democracy; seeing the shadow of Putin’s war fall across Europe; feeling climate change starting to bite and understanding how ill-prepared all but the richest of us are to find a way to live together in our reshaped world.

I’ve long understood that entropy is the force that strives to reset the universe to normal: vast, cold and lifeless. Heat always runs to cold. Life always ends in death. Sometimes, that knowledge can feel overwhelming, making everything pointless because it is doomed to erasure.

I spend most of my days trying to ignore entropy, not in the hope that it will go away but that it will get out of my way. I follow Springsteen’s advice that I have to “learn to live with what I can’t rise above“.

That’s become harder recently, not just because entropy is making more noise but because my life has grown quieter since I retired and in that quiet it’s easier to hear entropy scratching like mice behind a skirtingboard.

For the first time in many decades, I’m faced not with the question I used to ask on cold workday mornings, “Why do I have to get up today?” but with the question that my leisured state poses: “Why should I get up today?” Asking that question each day would be opening the door to entropy.

So, as is my habit, I’ve fallen back on bloodymindedness. I raise two fingers to entropy and tell it that today is not its day. Today is mine. I don’t need a reason to get up. I would need a reason not to get up. I choose life because it’s better than the alternative. I choose life because any other choice would feel like a defeat.

Entropy is of course indifferent to my defiance. It is patient. It knows what the final move of the game will be. It can wait and in the meantime, it can erode and undermine and leach away the things that bring me joy.

There are days when the rhetoric of defiance doesn’t work isn’t enough for me either. Days when it feels like whistling past the graveyard. I’m sixty-seven. I can feel the downdraft from death’s wingéd chariot and I wonder how many decades it would be worth living once physical decline robs me of the ability to do the things I like to do. When would my bloodymindedness tip over from stalwart defence into harmful denial?

On those days, I get restless. Which is how I came to find Tom Hirons’ poem ‘In The Meantime’. and his assertion that “Life leans towards living.” and I realised why defiance isn’t enough. Life isn’t just the opposite of death. I don’t choose to continue to live Just because the alternative is death. I choose to live because living is worth it. Or it can be.

Yes, all life is an act of defiance of the forces of entropy. Heat goes to cold. Life goes to death. But the heat is worth it. Life is worth it because of the small joys: loving and being loved, the beauty we find in people and places if we take the time to look, the endless curiosity that turns over fresh earth full of possibilities each day and those moments of creativity when you amplify the life flowing through you,

It seems to me that Tom Hirons’ poem is saying that the best response to entropy is to embrace the ephemeral and to hold back the cold by sharing our heat.

I know I’m not good at that. I’m too solitary and spend too much time in my head. But not being good at something is not an excuse for refusing to try to get better, to let my life lean toward living.