Is there any similarity between the two?
It’s an early Saturday morning. Raining. Is it mist or cloud covering the sky? My husband is still in bed. I go downstairs, pick up a dry mop, and start sweeping the hardwood floor in the living room.
Although the floor looks clean, after several trips back and forth between the walls, the mop collects cotton-like dust, strings of long hair, and other small particles (breadcrumb?).
It’s my weekly chore, for sure, but I kind of like this monotonous movement of my body.
No matter how thoroughly I sweep today, the floor will be filled with the yucky-looking things again. Is cleaning, like sweeping the floor, such a hopeless action with little value added to one’s life? Then why do I like it? Why do I refuse to hire somebody to do this chore for me?
“Life decreases or keeps constant its entropy by feeding on negative entropy.” This is a concept introduced by Nobel-laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger in his 1944 book “What is Life.”
When I heard this sentence on a podcast, I found out why I like sweeping the floor.
Cleaning is an act of decreasing entropy. It’s an analogy of life. By cleaning, I must have been experiencing what it means to live.