Everything that we consume either satiates, stimulates, depresses, enriches, depletes, ascends, descends, dries, or lubricates. Foods, activities, relationships, TV shows, even inanimate objects…anyways, you get the picture. This is simply an invitation to observe.
Let’s take a relatable example like coffee, i.e. the oil that greases the wheels of modern society. Maybe the solitary reason you can stand waking up to an alarm. When you drink a cup of coffee, how do you feel? Does it always feel the same? And when it doesn’t, what has changed? The coffee? Or you? Energetics. What we ingest has energetics just as we do. Just as the seasons do and just as the earth does.
Imagine a deliciously hot cup of coffee on a steamy morning in July. Now on a blustery afternoon in February. What about that cup you drink at the airport at 3:30am on your way to see your mom? Hmm, I’m guessing some of these circumstances are more likely to produce headaches than others….
What’s great about coffee is that at its best, it’s a cup of on-the-highway-in-traffic-but-things-are-moving-and-I-gotta-stay-sharp. The brain is stimulated, the circulatory system is functioning at its most capable, and things feel good but are mildly stressful at the same time.
At its worst, coffee is an angering, drying, headache-inducing, morning-mania-maker. Depends on the day.
I’ve been trying a mild-experiment with coffee intake. I say mild because I’m fully aware of my dependence on caffeine and it’s basically a love-love relationship. But…if I drink 2 cups of coffee before work, I notice that by about 3 pm I’m feeling quite famished and a little of that Jessie Spano, “There’s no time, there’s never any time” (if you know, you know). Basically, I’m irritated and stressed about literally nothing.
Now let’s take the no caffeine morning. Definitely less pep in my step but 3pm rolls around and time is feeling EXPANSIVE. I may be leaning towards the boredom spectrum, but I’m certainly not feeling worked up. Two minutes feels like five. Almost as if things are more possible. I’d probably just need some coffee to get them done.
What I’ve done with this information is try very hard to remember it. When I have weeks of elevated stress, dehydration or poor sleep, maybe the answer is actually less caffeine. I could use words like yang, dispersing, acrid, and astringent, but we all need agency in our daily food choices. How does what you ingest affect you? And how does it change? Maybe you can’t eat cheese in the springtime because it aggravates your allergies, but maybe it’s not a problem in the autumn. Just something to think about.
