State of the Senses

The human condition can be described in no better terms than “frailty”. Our sense of personal well-being fluctuates with every headache, rush of euphoria and substance intake. Feeling down? Take a healthy heaping of caffeine or alcohol. Have a headache? Try taking a run or some aspirin.

But what astounds me more than the flux of humankind’s self-perception is how seldom they register the moments of clarity in contrast to the moments of pain and discomfort.

Perhaps you can relate.

When you have a sore throat, a tooth ache or are simply congested you take notice of your miserable state. You think ‘Man, this sucks.’ But now think about the opposite end of the pole. When you’re sitting in a park on a beautiful spring day. The sun is shining but a nice breeze cools you even as the solar rays warm you in this natural confection oven we call earth. You close your eyes and breathe in deep. The scent of blooming flowers, fresh grass and rain in the distance fill your olfactory receptors with a pleasure unparalleled in the array of smells. You fell entirely comfortable.

But do you take note of it?

Probably not. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that means for you feeling perfectly well is the rule rather than its exception. But I doubt it. I am incredibly pessimistic but I credit this doubt not to this negativity but rather to the tendency of people to dwell more on pain than pleasure.

Yes, your mind is flooded with endorphins in those moments of intense pleasure, but somehow they seem to fade faster than the throbbing impulses which inform our mind of recurring agony.

Two days ago I sat in the City Hall Park staring at the fountain. People came and went as I stared intensely upwards with no thought in my mind other than a stern concentration on one fact: I am sublimely comfortable right here and now. At that moment there was no future. No past. No concern for what I had to do in an hour or what I’d done years before. Broken relationships. Triumphs of the horizon. All received a present nullification in face of supreme relaxation.

I focused on these thoughts as I took stock of every muscle, nerve-ending and synapse my body could locate with nothing more than thought. Yes my muscles were sore from working out – but it was a pleasurable soreness differing in every way from the ache of influenza.

My mind was clear.

When was the last time you could say the same?