Fragile

Organization is the opposite of chaos. Left to itself the universe decays, becomes more random, unorganized in a process called entropy. Life is an opposing force to chaos, and life seems fragile. Fragile means easy to break. Life requires so many interconnecting working systems that it appears fragile, as one system breakdown impacts the others and so many must work together to sustain life. Death, taking out life, is permanent, a crash, a state from which there is no return by worldly forces.

At the same time, life is resilient. The organizing force that is life is a force that organizes around obstacles, that requires stress to grow stronger. The avoidance of challenge leads not to strength but to decay of skills, muscles, and spirit. Life is an amazing adapting force, so long as it persists. Life overcomes chaos because life struggles, while chaos just is. Lives interconnect in relationship, to creator and to each other, to increase resilience exponentially. Each individual life is finite and ever more fragile with age, but often leaves behind it more lives to carry on. Networks of life are stronger than a life, and many types of life instinctually connect to other lives in relationship for survival.

Victor Frankl says in Man’s Search for Meaning the most important factor in how resilient a human life will be is commitment to a purpose. He refutes thoroughly a theory of Freud’s that predicted suffering would lead us all to equal depravity with his painfully gained observations from Auschwitz. Instead, Frankl observed a divergence, a loss of some to depravity but a honing of character in other people that led to moral fortitude of enormous strength. Is that resulting strength one of the creator’s purposes in allowing suffering?

Each life makes a decision: to live for self or to live for something larger. Living for self devolves to decadence, and living for something larger builds character.

From a Christian perspective, it is a decision to live for self in this world, or to live for the eternal objective of God’s glory. That eternal perspective can lead to fortitude to face the suffering of this day. Death in this view is permanent in that the decision made to accept and follow Jesus is permanent: we will spend eternity with him or not based on a decision made here in this life. All else is temporary.