Probably

Once I realized I had less control over my dogs with one leash than two, I ditched the newfangled dual-leash model and went back to two leads, two hands. A steep downhill begins at the mouth of my driveway. It’s treacherously layered in ice and snow. I wear spikes to keep from getting dragged off by my meatheads who are always gung-ho at the beginning of a walk. Immediately commences a dance of leashes that keeps me switching hands, overlapping lines, and uncrossing cables while hanging on for dear life. Moments later, somebody crisses their cross again.

“What’s the statistical likelihood of walking two dogs on two leashes and the leashes remaining uncrossed?” I asked ChatGPT. Its answer? “Vanishingly small. Practically doomed.”

This didn’t make sense to me since it seems that there should at least be some probability that the leashes remain untangled, even once in a while. Turns out statistics favor tangled leashes because given the character of a dog, the tangled state is the stable state. My heart sank. Part of this dilemma owes to the wiggly path of a dog. They drift, get distracted, follow their noses, chase squirrels. What emerges is as clear a definition of entropy as I’ve ever encountered. Nature prefers knots. Order, straight lines, and square corners aren’t natural.

This got me thinking about the infinite monkey theorem that if you give a monkey a typewriter and enough time, it’ll almost surely pluck out a work of Shakespeare. But the two ideas run opposite one another. The monkey needs infinite time, but my dogs are inevitably going to tangle the second we walk out the door. What would take forever is for them to walk forward untangled. Monkeys will mathematically and eventually create order by accident, but dogs destroy it by their very nature.

This means that I need to wrap my brain around the inevitable tangle. Every few steps the dogs will undo me. Nothing is learned. Nothing improves. We continue anyway, in spite of it. Embrace the tangle, I tell myself. The dogs don’t care. Evidently, I’ll survive. This is not a metaphor for writing or life or anything lofty. It’s just what happens when forward motion meets curiosity. The rest is commentary. Probably.