Is It Life You’re Living?
Coffee and time are not the friends we think they are
The last nail in the coffin of the collective ego came with coffee. Coffee brought humankind up to its head. Before, it had resided more in the instinctual and emotional centers, in the gut and the heart.
The Arab enlightenment testifies to this. The mathematics then born coincided with the introduction of coffee. This was around the 1200’s. Around the 1600’s Europeans and Americans began having coffee regularly. Very suddenly, the streets stopped being filled with drunkards. Overall, the outdoors became less salient, as coffee sparked people’s brains and brought them indoors to do calculus and create to-the-point art. The latter often meant art for the industries. There are historians who believe Da Vinci and Rembrandt held factories for painting production, where artists mass produced paintings and the masters simply signed and sold.
Have you noticed how pre-enlightenment poetry and music is very run-on? How verses go on and on, how perpetual bridges are, how painters seemed to have patience for the tiniest detail?
Coffee gave us deep analysis. It also gave us hurry. Hurry is the antipode of love, which must be focused, attentive, accepting. Hurry is the opposite of acceptance.
Is all this bad? Perhaps. Perhaps it is merely an evolution by temporary devolution, what with no advancement being truly linear in the grand scheme of things. So far, humankind has come up with marvelous strap-on contraptions. Airplanes. Pleasure toys. Video calls. Penicillin.
There is no being away from one another anymore. Even if you weren’t a coffee drinker, you were caught up in the zeitgeist of industry. And it was all authored by the burn of coffee. Except, who is one another?
If coffee has made us less emotional and intuitive, are we still humans? We are very good at delineating. But we are poor at experiencing. The connection to feeling like we have less time is very clear, and this factors in coffee.
Is it perhaps only in retrospect that we can understand that we live to the abstraction of love, not the experience of it? If we check ourselves very closely, can we notice how it is isn’t life we are living, but the idea of it?
It has all been in the name of efficiency. But we have been efficient enough. Such pieces always end with it’s time to take action. But what if it’s just time? What if this is all we have?
