Guidepost Eleven: The Power of Entropy (Aka Episode 54)

A Whackadoodle story about boiling frogs, abusive relationships, and what it sometimes takes to turn the heat down.

Photo by Sanket Rajurkar on Unsplash

She whirled around to face me, and began walking backwards in order to keep a few paces ahead, all the while wagging her finger in my face. “You’ve been being bad, awfully bad,” she accused merrily.

We’d declared the day too depressing to have a civics tutoring session, and instead had decided to wander down towards the bay access to see if the ducks were about. In her non-wagging hand, she twirled a bag of bread crusts that had been waiting in my freezer for just such an opportunity.

It was July 3, 2024, and tomorrow would be the fourth, but I had not hung out the American flag. That very week the Supreme Court had made another outrageous ruling, basically saying that it was acceptable for a United States President to break the law so long as the law breaking was part of an official act. It was yet to be tested what might constitute an official act. We were both feeling decidedly unpatriotic.

“Awfully bad,” I echoed, ignoring her wagging finger. “Does that mean I am awful at being bad, and is that the same thing as being terribly good? I mean when you think about it, awfully bad and terribly good are kind of like kissing cousins when it comes to semantics. What do you think?”

“I think you’re avoiding the subject.”

“I wasn’t aware that we’d chosen a subject. I thought we were taking a walk.”

“This always happens when you’re on Guidepost Eleven. You go weeks without writing a thing. You must really hate entropy.”

“I am completely indifferent with regards to entropy,” I assured her. “I accept entropy as a fact of life, just as I accept all the other ‘currents’ the guideposts help us navigate.”

“Currents?”

“Cause and effect, belief, reflection, focus,” I broke off. “Do I really need to go through all fourteen again?”

“No, no” she said, falling back into step beside me, the bag of bread crusts bumping against her leg. “I am well aware of the list. But I don’t get why you’re suddenly calling them currents.”

“Because, like river currents, they simply exist whether you like them or not, whether they sink you or not, whether you notice them or not.” I explained. “Knowing how those currents influence life’s challenges makes those challenges easier to understand, to steer through, and sometimes to eventually accept.”

“But you’re not feeling accepting today?” she asked grimly.

“Nope, but then I’m reminded that a problem is only a problem if I can and want to do something about it. Everything else is a fact of life, so at some point during this walk, I’ll get over it.”

“Humm,” she grunted uncommittedly, and slapped the bag of bread crumbs against her thigh.

Our conversation stalled into thoughtful silence as we turned down the path to the bay access and made our way to the sea wall. It was a fine day for it. Sunlight glinting on the water. A light breeze clearing the air. The sky was cloudless—a blue that almost but did not quite hurt the eyes. We settled ourselves on the sea wall, and I instantly pulled off my sandals to soak my feet in the cool salty brew.

But the comfortable silence didn’t last long, and presently she said into it, “Do you ever feel like you’re a frog in a slowly heating pot who’s not jumping out of the water because the heat is rising so slowly that you don’t even realize you’re about to boil?”

“Would it count if I sometimes felt like a frog surrounded by a bunch of frogs waiting for someone else to make the first jump?” I asked absently.

She snorted in reply, so I added, “You do know that the slowly boiling frog story is apocryphal, don’t you?”

“You mean like apocalyptic?”

“No, I mean like apocryphal, as in a story or statement of doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true. Frogs don’t just sit there and stupidly boil alive. It is true that they will sit comfortably in the slowly warming water for quite a while because their cold blooded bodies adapt to the heat better than our warm blooded bodies, but eventually, even they are smart enough to recognize that the water is about to reach their critical thermal maximum, and they’ll try to jump out. I suppose their success depends upon the depth of the pot and each frog’s ability to jump.”

“Are you sure?” her brows drew together. “I’ve heard that they just sit there until they boil.”

“Don’t believe me? Look it up yourself when we get back.”

“Why wait,” she said and pulled her iPhone out. I couldn’t help but feel a little nostalgic watching her, thinking back to a time when outings like this meant your phone stayed home stuck on a wall and research meant visiting your local librarian. I reached for the bag of crusts that she had left sitting beside her, and began shredding the slices into duck size mouthfuls. Next to me, she alternately clicked on and listened to her iPhone. “Well, what do you know,” she said at last and passed her phone to me expectantly. I dutifully put down the crusts and reach for her phone. A faceless voice confirmed what I had just told her.

As I handed her phone back, she insisted, “Okay, so the story isn’t exactly true, but like he said in the video, it still explains a lot about why people react to slow change the way they do. Climate change. Political change. Although,” she added as an after thought. “I’m quite not sure how it relates to abusive relationships.”

“That’s probably because you’ve never been part of an abusive relationship. Consider yourself lucky.”

She looked a bit startled, “That sounds like…I mean,” she hesitated. “You haven’t been in an abusive relationship, have you?”

“I’m not sure if I would call what I experienced a relationship, but I have been on the receiving end of slowly escalating abusive behavior, and looking back, it did start slow. So slow, I barely noticed, but consistent enough to begin to feel normal. It’s when you accept abuse as normal that it gets bad. When you start to think that maybe you’ve done something to deserve the increasing verbal attacks. When you begin to believe what they say about you in those attacks. You start to walk on egg shells, and you put up with actions that you hate because you’re afraid to say anything and risk another outburst.”

“How did you get out of it?”

“For a long time I didn’t. I put up with it. I let things slide, like it was normal for someone to go off on me whenever they got upset. I gave in to the outbursts and never argued. Never tried to defend or explain my position because I knew that it would just become another outburst. I started not doing things so as not to upset the cart, or be in the way,” I added as an after thought, “I also started to dislike myself and my life.”

“But you did get out of it?”

“Eventually,” I nodded. “As with so many other cases like mine, it took another person to see what was happening and to actually label it as a type of domestic and mental abuse. I remember being a bit shocked by the label. Me, a victim of domestic abuse? No way. I would never be gullible enough to put up with abusive behavior, but once I really thought about it, I had to agree with my friend. Abuse is all about control, and he had been using his outbursts and my self-doubt to cower and control me for years.”

“You mean to get his way,” she corrected.

“Yeah. To get his way,” I agreed. “Once I admitted to myself that what was happening to me was abusive, toxic behavior and not at all normal, healthy behavior, my first impulse was to offer to sit down with a counselor or mediator to get to the roots of the problem and try to work things out, but my friend put me off that idea pretty fast.”

“How? Why?”

“He asked if I thought it was ever okay to yell at, belittle, or verbally attack, someone to get my way? To which I of course said, ‘Absolutely not.’ Then he asked if I thought that my abuser would ever admit that his behavior had been abusive, belittling, unhealthy, or wrong? To which I also had to admit that I doubted he ever would. No, he felt he was absolutely in the right, and that I was absolutely at fault for everything wrong in his world. After that realization, I was left with three choices. Put up with it. Move out of my own house. Ask him to find new living arrangements.” I shook my head at the memory. “I was so afraid of facing his reaction to my telling him to move out that I couldn’t tell him myself. My friend delivered the news, and right on cue, the fireworks went off. He spent the next two hours yelling, swearing, accusing, threatening. It was non-stop. He called us both every name in the book. He brought up resentments he had held for years. He pontificated in elaborate detail about how ungrateful I was. He even brought up things that had nothing to do with him, like how I was a disgraceful, disgusting, and ungrateful daughter because I had chosen to not attend my mother’s final viewing. Jesus, I didn’t even want her to have a final viewing. And I’m pretty sure that she wouldn’t have wanted a final viewing, but did anyone ask opinion? I said good-bye to my mother in my own way, and all this time, he had resented me for it. Let’s just say, the evening was intense.”

“What did you do while he was yelling?”

“What could I do? I knew that anything I said would only be turned against me, so I just stayed silent and waited for the yelling and insults to be over.”

“And eventually they stopped?”

“I think he finally got tired of getting no reaction. He sulked on the couch for three days, refusing to do anything but feed himself and use the bathroom. I think he spent most of that time on the Internet, or sleeping. I know that I simply avoided him. On the third day, he overheard a private phone conversation my friend was having with someone who was trying to talk us out of making him move. He heard his name mentioned from the other room, along with the words, ‘No, he needs to find a new place,’ and another hours long tirade started, but this time it included packing sounds. He left that night after saying a whole lot of unforgettable things, but good-bye was not one of them. You know, it’s funny,” I added as the memories came flooding back. “One of the things he always claimed in any outburst was that I had no right to complain, or comment, or disagree. I should just be grateful for all he did, but once he was gone, I was like, ‘What did he actually do that I should be so grateful for?’ Turned out, not so much, and a lot of how he did things, I didn’t like.”

“Like what?”

“Like the way he would hide things that didn’t belong to him. He didn’t like the fact that my dad had all these water bottles, so one by one he started hiding them, until Dad only had two. Then one day, I couldn’t find my water bottle; the one water bottle that I took to work every day. Turns out, he’d hidden that one too. I looked for hours. I found it a year later when I discovered his hiding place. He did the same thing with the spoons, the towels, the lawn tools. At one point, he started throwing out things that weren’t his because he thought they were too old, or were in his way. The cord to my ear pods cost me $45 bucks to replace. I still haven’t replaced the shower caddy, the doormats, the floor rug, my pedicure brush, my favorite brownie baking pan. A lot of other things are still missing, either hidden or tossed. And then he started moving our things around and packing stuff away, stuff that wasn’t his to move or pack, and if someone asked about it, he would blow up. How dare we question how he wanted to do things? We should just be grateful for all he did because without him we would be lost. Turns out that when he left, I didn’t feel lost. I felt free to actually clean the house my way without stepping on his toes. I could wash my clothes and do the dishes without accidentally getting in his way or inadvertently insult how he did things, and I no longer had him looking over my shoulder reminding me how useless I was. No, I didn’t miss all his ‘help’ at all.”

“Wow,” was her first reaction. “So in your case, you kicked the frog out of the pot,” was her second.

“No, I very politely gave someone thirty days notice. And he wasn’t the frog. He was the slowly heating water that I needed to turn down before boiling.”

“And the water temperature is better now?” she asked, sticking to the metaphor.

“Much better.”

“But most people just let the water boil, don’t they?” she concluded to herself. I made no comment, but simply scanned the water for any sign of ducks. Her face became scrunched up in thought. “I suppose,” she struggled to put her ideas into words. “I suppose people stay in the pot because they get comfortable with the heat—just like the frogs—and it takes something, or maybe someone, on the outside to help them notice they’re about to boil.”

I was busy scanning the water. Not a duck in sight. I glanced down at the murky bay floor with it’s mud tinged coral. ‘Well,’ I sighed to myself. ‘We can always feed the crabs.’

She looked at me suddenly, “Do you think it takes a crisis to make people jump out of the pot?”

“Hum?” Her question startled me. “I hadn’t considered that,” I replied, reaching again for the bread crumbs. “You might be right. People do tend to roll along not noticing a potential problem until a crisis hits that forces them to make a change.” I sprinkled a handful of the crumbs on the water, and watched them slowly sink. “But then again, a lot of people just rebuild on the same flood-plain using the same floor plan once the crisis is over. People only change when they see a reason to change, and change is never easy. It actually requires some practice; it actually requires some willingness; and it usually requires that people accept that their way of doing things might not be the most effective way.”

“Humm,” it was her turn to grunt. “I don’t suppose anyone likes to admit to being wrong.”

“And when we fail to admit mistakes to ourselves, we are more likely to repeat those mistakes. In my case, I shouldn’t have been so afraid of conflict that I couldn’t stand up for myself right at the beginning. I should have told him that if he wanted to continue to share a home with me, he needed to learn how treat people with respect at all times rather than lashing out at them when angry, or frustrated. And if he ever had a problem with me or anyone else in the house, he needed to learn how to deal with that problem in a more nourishing way, without sneaking around or harboring resentments while pretending nothing’s wrong. Those things destroy relationships.”

“And if he had lashed out at you for telling him that?”

“I should have not been afraid to suggest he find a new home.” I half smiled. “I’d like to think that I’ve learned a bit from the whole thing, and that I will do better should I run into a similar situation, but it seems that standing up for myself has never been my forte. I tend to run from potential conflict rather than learning to confront it positively.”

“Something to work on, right?”

“If you only knew.”

She tossed a pebble into the water, adding, “Do you think that he will ever learn to change.”

“Doubtful. He once told me during a more pleasant time that he doesn’t do philosophy. He doesn’t do introspection. Hurts his head too much. No, if he thinks of me at all, I’m pretty certain that he just reminds himself of how unreasonable and ungrateful I am. How I repaid all his help by throwing him out and how much I had hurt him. I seem to remember that he loved telling stories about people when they weren’t around to give their side.”

“That kind of sucks.”

“That is something I can’t worry about because it is something I can’t control. Any influence I might have ever had on him is totally gone.”

“Entropy really does sneak up on you, doesn’t it?” she concluded at last. “I suppose that’s why it’s so important to occasionally think about how it works, even if it is depressing.”

“It doesn’t have to be depressing,” I assured her. “It can be just thinking about the areas in your life that might need a little extra nourishment because they’ve been neglected too long. Remember that coming up with solutions to nourish those things, gives us a chance to turn the water down before we boil over.”

We settled into a comfortable silence for the rest of the hour, each of us busy with our own thoughts. The ducks never did turn up, but the crabs were enjoying quite a banquet by the time we headed home.

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