Self-repair

For ages I've thought of caffeine as an unnatural curse. A state we're addicted to in order to match our psyche with the unnatural pace of the modern world. A coping mechanism. Don't get me wrong, I love the stuff. But on my walk to work this morning, embracing the black tea coursing through my system and clearing my head of small traces of migraine, I was digging the usual caffeinated great love for the world. I loved the small triangle of sky peeking out, the 15th floor of the tallest buildings, that small woman and her aggressive walk, the stationary traffic, etc etc. And then I got to thinking, what if the way we feel at the appropriate level of caffeination is the normal human state? The way we would feel most of the time if we were in the environment we evolved to fit? What if this modern world, with it's strange combination of understimulation (aka we're not looking out for tigers or food all the time) and overstimulation (environmental and work-related stress), causes an unusual slothful normal state? It could be other factors too, like contact with plastics/metals/other pervasive substances, large numbers of people with large variations of germs, modern medicine, or any other factor new age types have thought up as the cause of modern ills. So we caffeinate to bring ourselves to correct awareness, because we know our usual state is not ideal.

The mind has a great ability to detect when things aren't right and to self-correct. That's why I'm not worried about apocalypse. The future will be intensely different, but we've been able to detect the off-balance of the world early enough to prevent Armageddon. We constantly poke at philosophy and religion cavities, striving for the correct filling, the one that feels right. When we find the one that's right for us, we want everyone else to know about it, because it feels so great. But each person needs to fill a different set of holes. What makes one whole, agitates another. We are Lego pieces in form but not in spirit. Maybe we need to start small and fill our personal holes, before we can go about fixing the hole in the world. It makes me crazy when in the work place we do not start at the beginning of a problem. Maybe the same is true about fixing the environment.