Sugar from salt

Lockdown, meltdowns, primitive earth, and special brews

That’s the thing though. It is pretty tough to feel productive when everything smells the same. It makes it even harder to separate between productivity from chill, and even at times sugar from salt (as I found out yesterday). The context has gone, the essence of the environment previously optimised for Netflix and abnormal snack consumption is now the cauldron of your life’s fragments, where everything is now wrapped up with your floordrobe like a confused burrito.

Here is a confession, I wrote this blog about 13 days ago, which despite my daily dose of reminders to eat, socialise and at times chill, I couldn’t grasp the signal to press the ‘go’ button. Much like a lot of us, I too rely on the cheap thrills of sensory change to trigger the alarms for an action potential – a productive readout. In this time where the word ‘action’ is the new black, nothing in my environment induced the usual sense of emergency. In fact, they have fallen flat into a massive onesie, swirling time and space into a twisted homogeneity reminiscent of spam (a 1937 meat-based product that became popular in world war-II, ironically appropriate for quarantine).

How do I know if I am on the right track? There must be more to my days than using the furniture to guide my next steps, or the daily thrill of bra removal to relieve the days from an empty chase? There is sunlight outside but you somehow feel caught trapped in the dark.

Let’s face it- sugar, pants, electricity, and internet are all I have. Connection is no longer an option (sometimes applicable to lazy wifi), and you can forget mating since even handshakes are on a lockdown, let alone prolonged eye contact. The fundamental elements of Maslow’s hierarchy for the environment we live in has now refocused from our usual compass. Primed for experimentation and an uncharted assembly.

Yes, it is time to experiment in this new confused soup we now call home….and office, and leisure area, and gym, and meditation zone, including the fancy wall you like to show off in virtual meetings. You have more than enough elements and freedom to play with, and you may as well since no one can see you and also you are going to be skint anyways for the foreseeable year. The ingredients are there, just you standing in your room internally spinning. Stay there for a second while I take you through one of my favorite experiments of all time, which will come in handy in coiling your frustration into an evolved clarity.

The Miller-Urey experiment.

The Miller-Urey experiment was a chemical concoction that simulated the conditions thought to be present in early earth to test the chemical origins of life. This was done in 1952 by the way (probably for pure lols which was enough in those days), which to my millennial self is basically the same as year zero. The conditions they tried to simulate were harsh environments present on primitive earth around 4.2 million years ago, entailing profuse volcanic activity and temperatures a lot more heated than your average Jaccuzi. The air ballooned with fundamental compounds that radiated the air into a charged electrochemical static, including compounds such as methane (not too far off from your own bedroom post-dinner). The sheer extremities were thought to favor the synthesis of basic ingredients into more complex and evolved components. After the pressurized turmoil and extreme temperate weathers, they found that the basic fundamental atoms such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen assembled into the building blocks of life that we still rely on heavily today – amino acids, and therefore my personal favourite… proteins <3. Quite amazing what energy can do.

From single atoms to amino acids, fatty acids, proteins, tissues, organs, and the neurons that give you scope to read this. From the tiniest atom to our own bodies. This kaleidoscope of transitions from basic to complex toyed with vital chemistries energized by the challenging conditions, gathering their mass into a crystallised thought.

Much like how the first atom took an energetic relief from making its first connection in space, and how the miller-urey’s building blocks pirouette into complexity – you too are made to cascade through the options of assembly. To revise the benchmark of how you live your days, the thresholds of acceptability, and to wade through old laundry to find what is actually important to you and how it can feel surprisingly natural. But much like the assembly of life, it doesn’t happen over night.

Ready,steady, meltdown.

How do you create signal from noise when you are internally spinning but externally chained? This whole unplanned for disequilibrium has fluxed in context, where order and disorder have been squished into a mille fuelle that you are currently rationing since obtaining toilet paper is no longer an everyday promise. So here you are, in your own primordial soup of life, where the elements of your choosing are now in one room, mutating your enclosed sanity into an open loop of nauseating self doubt.

The harsh conditions of lockdown can affluently breed frustration- a frictioned vice of time and space melting into a lava-bed of energy. You need this, so keep it there for now, since this is your volcano. Fantastic, this is a great start.

It is time to breakdown into your own Miller-Urey, and to deconstruct the parts that make you feel empty. React like earth designed you to and do the holy grail of social sins and sink into despair, trans-mutating between the cries of thundering storms and the electricity of tickled delight. The reaction is shaking into meltdown, the knees start to cave in, your back arched until your head is vacuum packed into concavity, like the hoardings from your last shop. Boiling thoughts leak out from you like lava in between the laundry piles, molten nodules eventually touching the open ends of switch on phone chargers, ricocheting currents that trigger the sharpening of synapses that stretch your nervous system. The eyes blacken into a hopeful shut down, and your head turns cold.

Special brew

When dawn breaks, the thickened dust of thoughts evaporate into a fragile clarity, the ingredients from the storm brews and senses start to normalize. Ironically at this point I am often partial to a what I used to refer to as a special brew. Which apparently is not the dedicated pet name for one’s favorite brand of loose leaf tea. This is pressure cooker of evolution and assembly is the essence of the human instinct failing to control it’s internal environment -spurring anxiety, but also the painful wellspring of creativity seeds. You could even argue that this inevitability is the most valuable way to spend energy if you are inclined for a bit of sadomasochism. Doesn’t hurt now and then.

Having Autism, ADHD, and generalized anxiety disorder, I have had my fair share of panic attacks and meltdowns in my life to realize that they aren’t the end of the world, but actually the creation of a new one. The chemistry of your mind has changed. The valency of your thoughts have refocused into a new light. The night and day are now your most basic constants for living, akin to heartbeats that span the energy of primitive times where life on earth took its first blink.  

You can open your eyes now.