We Need The Eggs

“It reminds me of that old joke- you know, a guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, hey doc, my brother's crazy! He thinks he's a chicken. Then the doc says, why don't you turn him in? Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs. I guess that's how I feel about relationships. They're totally crazy, irrational, and absurd, but we keep going through it because we need the eggs.” - Woody Allen in Annie Hall.

Today is Easter, the Day of Eggs. Jesus dies and then surprise- He performs the greatest comeback in show business.

I’M BACK….. The son also rises. What was lost is found. As they say in the horror show, IT’S ALIVE!!!

On a cellular level, death happens every day. The old is replaced by the new. Life ends and life starts over. This cycle of death and rebirth is as old as the seasons. Repetition is also form of renewal. Things appear to be repeating, endlessly repeating. But there may be subtle changes going on. Subtle unseen changes.

Your tears are not original. Your rain is not original. It is simply repeating entropy.

Shane Parrish writes the blog Farnham Street,” Entropy is simply a measure of disorder and affects all aspects of our daily lives. Left unchecked disorder increases over time. Energy disperses, and systems dissolve into chaos.

For every possible “usefully ordered” state of molecules, there are many, many more possible “disordered” states. Just as energy tends towards a less useful, more disordered state, so do businesses and organizations in general. Rearranging the molecules — or business systems and people — into an “ordered” state requires an injection of outside energy.

Let’s imagine that we start a company by sticking 20 people in an office with an ill-defined but ambitious goal and no further leadership. We tell them we’ll pay them as long as they’re there, working. We come back two months later to find that five of them have quit, five are sleeping with each other, and the other ten have no idea how to solve the litany of problems that have arisen. The employees are certainly not much closer to the goal laid out for them. The whole enterprise just sort of falls apart.”

Today is Easter and it is raining again. It is also Easter, again. Just as it is every year. It’s like if you have a calendar, you could actually map it out. We had a customer once who was complaining that we didn’t get them their order on time. Our excuse was that there was a holiday, which caused delays, and it was unforeseen blah blah blah. They rightly said, holidays happen every year. There is a pattern, and if you have a calendar, you could plan for the “ unexpected”, because guess what, the unexpected should be expected. Because it happens EVERY YEAR.

I see on the Book of Face that a friend has gone missing. Again. Sadly, this is not the first time; it is a sad pattern of their life. Every few months, he disappears. His partner is crying out for him to come home. I saw her post last night. Now again, this morning. She has gone through a night of not knowing. Now she’s going through a phase of disassociation. If it is so painful to care this much, then why should I care at all?

Because we need the eggs.

I don’t say this to diminish her pain. Her pain is real. It is horrible to care for someone, while they seem to care about you only when it suits them. Free spirits are a pain in the ass. Unfortunately, there is a pattern to this pain, just as there is a rhythm to the rain. Some years we have a sunny Easter. This year, we have a rainy one. Many people are in pain. Pain surrounds us. There will be people who disappear, and people who care. Checked out a book yesterday called Chris Beats Cancer. Chris was a 26 year old born again Christian who was surprised with a colorectal cancer diagnosis. He made the decision after the surgery to skip the chemo, and instead changed his diet, had children, and wrote a blog. He was inspired by Jack LaLanne.

Jack LaLanne had a fitness show. My mother watched it. I watched it. Jack "turned his life around" after listening to a public lecture about the benefits of good nutrition by health food pioneer Paul Bragg, focusing on the "evils of meat and sugar.

As an immediate remedy for symptoms such as constipation, insomnia, tiredness, anxiety, shortness of breath, or high blood pressure, LaLanne states that people will resort to various drugs: "We look for crutches such as sleeping pills, pep pills, alcohol, cigarettes, and so on."

When asked about sex, LaLanne had a standard joke, saying that despite their advanced age, he and his wife still made love almost every night: "Almost on Monday, almost on Tuesday, almost on Wednesday..."

“You know you're old when your walker has an airbag and they've discontinued your blood type."-- Phyllis Diller from the documentary How To Live Forever.

As my old friend Margaret Gabriel used to always say, ”Get on with it!”