The constant gardener

Once, way back when I was young, I suggested to my mother that we have white pillowcases instead of the colored and printed ones.

"But the white ones quickly become dirty," she said.

"Exactly.  That way we will always know that it is time to launder them."

If only I had known even at that age that nobody ever listens to what I have to say!  Not even my mother! ;)

My mother had a point.  In the heat and dust of the old world, white pillowcases become ecru and dark brown in no time at all.  Though, it is not any comfort to think that we used pillowcases that were dirty as hell, but we did not know they were that dirty only because they were dark colored to begin with!

It is the law of the universe.  Entropy makes sure that even the white snow gets dirty fast.  Even the white supremacists can try all they want, but sooner or later the world will become beige ;)

In an awesome essay, Siddhartha Mukherjee quotes G.K. Chesterton:

"If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.  If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. . . . An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.”

It requires constant work. Unnatural vigilance, indeed.

Everything in life requires constant work and attention.  Life itself mandates constant work.  Sitting around and doing nothing is unhealthy, the medical folks tell us over and over again.  Like hamsters, we therefore keep running and running.  Mukherjee brings in Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen: "The world is spinning so fast under her feet, she tells Alice, that “it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”

This against the cosmic backdrop of every action of ours ultimately amounting to nothing.  The cosmic joke that we have to constantly keep doing things only to make sure we will end up as stardust, again!