On a bright summer morning, one fine Monday, I sit down at my office desk after taking a little break. I just got a coffee. I'm typing an email.
As I take the first sip, I feel the warmth enter my belly. I've never noticed this particular sensation before. Or rather, I just have not paid enough attention to it. That was fun!
Usually I space out my sips to optimise the pleasure I can draw from any cup. But this one got me curious. I make an exception. I take another sip right away just to observe that sensation again.
This time I follow it from start to finish. It starts at the tip of my lips, and I realise that I can trace the flow along my tongue. The warmth moves to my neck, and half a second later, gravity takes over, a freer downfall… At a certain point in my stomach, it's gone. I can't find it anymore. And I think to myself curiously: *the coffee has officially become "me".*
Or has it? Is it just sitting inside my belly, pooling slowly as I drink more, water and bean particles being absorbed into my bloodstream? Or is it diluting the sandwich I ate for lunch half an hour ago, making a gooey paste to help break it all down? I have no idea. I could follow it only until the drop, and then I lost it.
Alright, that's enough daydreaming. Time to go back to my email. After all, I'm at work. I'm having a decently productive day. Getting so many things done this morning already. The email I'm writing right now is an important one. It marks the end of a project I have been working on for the past six months. It is a long reflection on both the good and the bad. It is going to be fitting closure for everyone who worked on it before we move on to the next one, filled with learnings.
When I take in the next few millilitres of the dark liquid gold, THAT’S IT. This time it hits way more intensely.
Suddenly, instantaneously,
My whole world splits open…
I am blown away by the fact that something that was outside me is becoming *me* — and I am able to witness the very beginning of that process. How is this even possible? How does this work?
It’s even more fascinating to think that once I lose it, my body smoothly takes over. It’s on autopilot. It just knows what to do with it. I have no idea what to do or how, but it just *knows*. The body carries knowledge and experience of doing this since a very long time. Moreover, once I was a tiny little boy, and the body itself is something that I simply collected over time. Apparently, it came from just two tiny cells, and then slowly accumulated everything it needed to form fingers and arms, legs and brains; ultra complicated mechanisms found nowhere else in the known universe.
It’s not that I'm a unique, one-time experiment that somehow worked out wonderfully. I see this all around me. The humans around me have similar systems acquired over time. They all seem to have most of the same parts. They all seem to be eating and growing. They all seem to lose control of some mechanisms, or become masters of others. There are specialists who spend their entire days studying these systems deeper. And there are people who have never once questioned, throughout their entire lifetimes, what these suits they live in really are.
How is it all staying together? How are the molecules in your hands not just falling apart? How are you able to decide where to place your hands — and, to a great extent, the exact trajectory of their motion? …. so many questions.
I wonder how people go about their days and years and decades without being curious about *what this really is*. What is this human experience we are having? This special mechanism — body and mind combined — is not just a unique miracle. It keeps happening. And currently, there are more than eight billion of us. And that's not even the half of it. There are plants and trees, endless varieties thereof. They bear something we call flowers, fruits, and vegetables — things that, as if by design, fit our bodily needs perfectly: to stay alive, to recover from ailments, to feel energised enough to go out looking for more food the next day. When we put these things in our mouths and chew, which our body somehow *asks* us to do by giving us a sensation called hunger — these things around us magically become our bodies and minds in turn. Their particles become perfectly integrated inside our blood, bone, and brain among others.
How can someone take this for granted? As if the way our bodies stay together and function in these incredibly complicated ways is just *normal*. How can you stop wondering, unless you truly understand it?
Every time I have a few minutes where I am not doing something — just being — this comes back to me. Moments where I return to the fundamentals, back to the basics, without the curtain of modern life's drama. Peeling the onion, one layer at a time, to see what's inside. The onion may bring tears along, but you can quickly notice how each layer is so interesting to uncover. The best I can do is go one layer at a time.
On the other hand, I realise I have a knife. If I chop the onion, I can make something extremely tasty out of it. Without peeling all the layers, I can still make it useful and enjoyable. But the curiosity about depth, about what reality actually is and what is deep within, keeps bringing me back to peeling my "humanity" off, purely to observe what is going on.
At this point, focusing on work feels absurd. What is it that I call work? I am working for something called a "company." The company makes "products" for people. The company itself is a collection of people spending time together to make these products, while getting rewarded at the end of the month with something called "money." The money they receive is used to buy those same products — and the cycle goes on... It is all interconnected. On going further, I realise the company I work for doesn't exist by itself. It is on paper. It is a thing people have agreed exists, but it is not itself a thinking, breathing entity. It cannot decide anything. It cannot hire or fire people. It cannot make products or sell services. It is simply a story told to bring people together, to make them commonly believe in a vision, to make something someone things will improve their own life and fulfill their own desires
May be I’m going down a spiral.
At this point, reality hits. Or vice versa?
I look down at my cup. It's still *half full*.
The coffee that was sitting in my mug just ten minutes ago is now, somehow, *myself*. While I was in my mind with these thoughts, it crossed the border between world and self so quietly I almost missed it. The cursor in my email is still blinking. The project reflection is still pending. And I realise that I genuinely have no idea where *I* end and everything else begins.
I take the last sip. It disappears into me. Or maybe I disappear into it.
I hit send.
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