Why Our Bodies Keep Their Warmth
Why Our Bodies Keep Their Warmth — After learning of entropy, I came to understand deeply that being alive is never something that comes for free. The world ceaselessly seeks to cool and scatter, and every living thing must gather itself against that current without resting for a moment. To keep warmth was not to stay still but to strive without end. So it is with tending a household, caring for relationships, holding the heart together. Left alone, all things scatter. Love, order, warmth — the moment we let go, they cool. So a lifetime spent diligently warming one family and keeping the household was a small miracle made against the law of the universe. To be alive is to strive, to the very end, to stay warm.
Hot soup always cools with time, and a warm room turns cold once the fire is out. Everything in the world, left alone, cools to match its surroundings. Yet our bodies alone hold 36.5 degrees even in the dead of winter cold. As long as we live, we do not cool. If cooling is the law of the world, how does a living body keep its warmth against that law?
In the 19th century, scientists wrestling with the steam engine found one of the world most merciless laws: heat flows only from hot to cold, never the reverse of its own accord. Order scatters, and everything grows ever more disordered. This they called the law of entropy. A broken cup does not mend itself; a scent, once spread, does not gather again. The whole universe moves in one direction — slowly cooling and dispersing. Then how is life, orderly and breathing, even possible within this vast current?
The answer is this: life does not break the law but cleverly pays it back. We eat ceaselessly. In food is the order — that is, the energy — that plants gathered from sunlight. Our bodies burn that energy to make warmth and keep the heart beating. In exchange, they ceaselessly cast out disorder, as heat and waste, to the outside. To keep the order within my body, it sends a greater disorder into its surroundings. Seen across the whole universe, entropy unfailingly increases. Life was not a dam that stopped the current, but a small whirlpool that takes in and lets out energy without ceasing for a moment. The instant it stops, we cool and become one with our surroundings. That we call death.
- The boiler that heats the house and the engine that moves the car run on the same principle: burn the order in fuel to gain work and heat, and send the leftover disorder outside.
- A refrigerator chills its inside while blowing more heat out the back. The law that order on one side demands greater disorder on the other, we see every day in the kitchen.
- The warmth our bodies give off is itself the sign of being alive. When an infrared thermometer reads the warmth of a forehead, it measures the very heat that life ceaselessly makes.
溫은 따뜻함을 뜻하니, 식어가는 세상에 맞서 끊임없는 애씀으로 체온을 지켜내는 생명의 일과 통한다.
Meet this hanja in Cheonjamun →After learning of entropy, I came to understand deeply that being alive is never something that comes for free. The world ceaselessly seeks to cool and scatter, and every living thing must gather itself against that current without resting for a moment. To keep warmth was not to stay still but to strive without end. So it is with tending a household, caring for relationships, holding the heart together. Left alone, all things scatter. Love, order, warmth — the moment we let go, they cool. So a lifetime spent diligently warming one family and keeping the household was a small miracle made against the law of the universe. To be alive is to strive, to the very end, to stay warm.
