On Feeling My Coffee.

A peculiar thing has occurred. Or, at least, I’ve noticed a peculiar thing given my new circumstances. Sitting in the office early this morning, watching a cruise ship come into the harbour, I realised that I could feel my coffee starting to work.

Now, I expect the average coffee drinker wouldn’t be surprised at noticing the feeling; it is, after all, one of the primary reasons people drink coffee. This is a relatively new experience for me, and not because I’m new to drinking coffee. Shit, no. I’ve been drinking coffee like it is the golden miracle elixir to eternal youth for as long as I can remember. The quantity of coffee I’ve consumed in my life must be well over what the medical profession might find appropriate.

The thing that I noticed this morning has less to do with coffee and more to do with life contrast. I mentioned to my wife last Sunday morning that I felt a bit dull, as we were leaving the house to go property hunting. Hunting being a nearly appropriately label for what it is you are forced to do in Wellington. Actually, property mining is more appropriate. A filthy, thankless job of moving mountains of detritus to find (or not, as it were) small glimpses of treasure. Which, for the last three weeks, has turned out to be fools gold. Bloody Wellington property market. Open pit sulfur property mining. With a spade and bucket. And the spade is broken. And the wife is crying.

Anyway, I digress. I mentioned to Danni on Sunday that I was feeling a bit dull and wondered if it might be related to the most excellent barbeque we’d had with our friends in the Kapiti Coast the preceding Saturday evening. Then I realised I hadn’t had a coffee yet. Which, if you know me, is a pretty strange place to be at 10am on a Sunday morning; coffeeless like a countryside Englishman at tea time, but without the tea. Using the scientific method — a methodology to which I fondly subscribe — I did an experiment. Before our first terrible engagement of furious hand to hand combat of the morning mining session, we stopped at McDonalds (don’t you fucking judge me!) where I ordered myself a large flatwhite as I am wont to do.

Mere minutes later I felt normal. Eureka! I exclaimed loudly with my inside voice (being a courteous citizen in public), I could feel the difference between not having coffee and having coffee. Grand! Then I forgot about that until this morning.

So watching the cruise ship this morning, sipping a really good flat white, it occurred to me that I could actually feel the coffee getting to work: it felt like a flywheel in my brain spinning up and building momentum, reducing the viscosity of thought from syrupy slow motion to free flowing acetone.

It then occurred to me that this recent development of being able to notice these small physiological changes must be a result of the recent lifestyle change. I left my job in Auckland for a new job in Wellington and the changes in my life (horrific knife fight property mining aside) have been relatively stark.

I’ve swapped a 3.5 hour per day commute for about 30 minutes. I wake up without an alarm, go to bed a bit later, drink less coffee, more water. The job involves doing something I love, so it doesn’t actually feel much like work. Any stress and anxiety that there may be is of a reasonable kind which means it isn’t deliciously fortified by existential dread.

It occurred to me that mere weeks before, with an alarm and sheer necessity forcing me out of bed at an ungodly hour, to commute for an hour and forty five minutes to work followed by a full work day and another hour forty five back home all the while never actually getting through all my email or my to do list, swanning from one delightful crisis to the next, all must have contributed to an ambient, cortisol enriched pressure that made feeling simple things like ‘coffee working’ impossible.

I know what you’re thinking: grand insight! But wait! That’s not the point! The thing that really occurred to me this morning is that when your life is generally stress free and you’re not living with at least a modicum existential dread, you actually notice really small changes in yourself and your life; how you feel; your emotions, your physiology. Good ones, but also the bad ones.

When life gets too good, when it is too easy, you start sweating the small things, and that’s also quite bad. When the small things are made big things then when the real big things come they feel like massive, insurmountable things.

And it is an objective fact that right now, life is actually better than it’s ever been, at any time in human history, for virtually everybody. Yet, many people — young ones in particular — seem to be suffering quite a lot psychologically and I can’t help but wonder if that is primarily related to them not being challenged enough, stressed and stretched enough, and, in the absence of that stretching and stressing are noticing the small things that our historical more dangerous environment used to quell.

You need some pressure and stress in your life. Perhaps not so much that you can’t feel mild stimulants working but certainly enough to shape you into a well rounded, resilient individual. Go camping. Go for long walks in the bush. Go surfing, skydiving, snowboarding, running. Play hockey or football. Go bow hunting. Deliberately stress your modernity privileged body a bit — in a good way — and free your mind from sweating the small stuff.

I’m going for a run when I find a damn house.