Ahhh, life. There’s something mystical about it. Something magical. You can taste it in the air, if you can—a fairy dust; an élan vital, pulsing beneath the skin of existence like a heartbeat. If you can’t seem to taste it, though, there may perhaps be something monotonous about life. And if you’re uncareful, that may turn into something morbidly mundane:
Ah. Life.
If you’re fortunate, life is a free-range, full-course, all-you-can-eat buffet. Ingredients are omnipresent; potential for creating and experiencing dishes is infinite; and variety’s aplenty to spice things up. And yet—
—Yet;
The routes we walk to those dishes often somehow stick with us. In us. As if we tread our daily lives in snow, and the pathways we create follow us wherever we go, and we, later, in turn, follow them, and we walk them, back and forth; to and from. The same dishes. Over and again.
Ahh…
Life?
Even ingredients we profess our love to and dishes we’ve declared our soul-mates lose their magical glamour when re-eaten ad nauseum. A change like that tends to happen slowly and unnoticeably—it happens with intervals in my own life. When through some luck I was snapped out of it some previous time, I learned there are things that can help colour through that greyscale state of mind, and I set off in search of recapturing that vibrant sparkle; that joie de vivre inside myself and that mystical quality in the world outside.
The thing that woke me up was chewing gum.
Chewing gum has a special property: It cleanses the palate, refreshing your senses and allowing you to taste the world anew. Even air becomes more ‘airy’ to the tongue after some teeth-on-(chewing)-gum action.
Thus, sometimes, after gum, I eat something… and the experience is like I’m tasting that said eaten something for the very first time again. Or perhaps it is even more intense than the experience was back then, as if through this philosopher’s gum I am granted access to the realm of true taste.
I can still vividly—fondly, even—recall my first experience of this ‘after-chewing-gum effect’. I had bought a couple of small bars of Kinder Chocolate and was eating them. They tasted great, so I chomped away. Then the experience lessened; I’d been eating them excessively, getting too used to the taste, and the returns were diminishing. I might’ve just waited and been patient before eating more, but, orally fixated as I am, I instead popped a pocket of chewing gum, flicked the small slab into the void between my jaws and chewed.
Mint flowed through my mouth, dispelling the lingering chocolate spirits. Fifteen minutes of mindless gnawing later I realised the wad had lost its charm and spat it out. Instantly feeling peckish, I reached for the closest edible thing at hand, but was unprepared for what vibrance was about to flood me. I disrobed the next Kinder bar and bit a piece off of it.
BBoOOoommmmm—!
Holy Mary and Joseph the Lord hath risen and he cameth upon my tongue.
My world was changed. I was like a babe born anew. The new taste swam around in me, breathing chocolate fire into my subjective experience. It wasn’t just ‘joy in living’—it neared ecstasy. What a discovery, and how beautiful things could taste.
The taste faded, and I remembered that I was more than just a tongue. Rallying together the pieces of my mind that had come apart, and still recovering from the surprise, I went on with my day. Soon, I felt peckish.
This Chewing Gum Effect does not always happen, and I don’t know exactly how either, but when it does take place it can be sensational. On top of that, the effect is not confined solely to the land of gourmet. Refreshment and intensification of sense-inputs can happen in different ways and across the board.
(I’ve come to call things that can cause such an effect ‘Life-Amplifiers’. By which I mean to refer to the non-pharmaceutical kind. Exotic substances are too easy and boring an answer; so aside from those we may necessarily indulge in as a convoluted side effect of having a heartbeat, no chemical feelgood substances.)
After that first experience, as the taste faded and I regained my sense of self, I did eat more chocolate. Those succeeding bites, though, though richly tasty still, failed to produce that deep, exciting subjective magic, and soon its richness dissolved too. My tongue had been cursed to have been blessed; I could not imagine anything comparable if I desired another such kind of experience.
Things could not remain that way, of course; thus I embarked on my quest to find out more about, and about more, Life-Amplifiers.
The next tool I encountered for sweetening sensations were aviators that were quite literally rose-tinted. (Browsing for sunglasses I found these looked pretty cool, so they may also have amplified others’ experience of me. But that is another matter.)
With them on, the world was overcome by a hue close to my favourite colour (which may or may not be ‘coral’). In the daylight hours everything just looked brilliant and perfectly beautiful; I couldn’t stop looking about. My eyes would tear up from the sights, and because I forgot to blink for lengths of time.
Come night, however, their effect on my field of vision turned negative and I looked plain suspicious with them on my nose. I was one bad moustache and a top hat away from being taken into custody for probably selling drugs. Having focused more on my vision for a while, then, and learning I couldn’t always don my rose-tinted sunglasses, I also started focusing more on my usual, sunglass-less, vision. And I came to appreciate it more. For instance, I learned that perspective and distance are to my eye what texture is to my tongue. Wearing any kind of glasses means there is a thin film over what I see, and it takes away a tiny but crucial bit of 3D, as if without glasses I can sort of ‘touch’ the things I see through my eyes, and with glasses on I cannot.
I returned my gaze to food with new hope. The lesson to simply focus more on things helped me better appreciate what morsels I was taking in through my mouth hole. After swallowing, that being said, though food had started tasting better—tasting more—I still missed that prior bursting intensity. Focusing on the subject of mastication alone wasn’t enough to reproduce it.
But these two encounters put together formed a clue.
The experiences had been intensified after the introduction of a new element that made things different; the chewing gum had refreshed the mouth and somehow amplified taste, and the sunglasses had extra-saturated my sight. Perhaps these Life-Amplifiers I was looking for brought about some state-change, and the bigger the change, the more widely I was shocked awake by the blast of pure reality.
A way to achieve the same effect for my vision, I thought, might be to close my eyes for a while, perhaps a year, then to open them again, and see if I could still see, and see if I saw more intensely. Perhaps best to start with something manageable like ten seconds, I thought, and I closed my eyelids and nearly biked into a river. Opening my eyes, then—very very quickly—was indeed a shock, although not entirely like I had hoped, and moreover I had learned a valuable lesson regarding the execution of spontaneously-inspired pseudoscientific experimentation.
Safely having returning from the grass onto the bike path, I reflected on this clue. Here was yet another amplifying element: the element of surprise.
To our pattern-based and heavily prediction-inclined brains, a sudden and unexpected The wind grew cold and stale, seeping out of the thicket and leaving the trees quiet as the dead of the night. There was no redemption for Mark, he knew; only a shot at survival as the shell of the man he once was. Even if he’d shaken off his pursuers for the moment, he could never outrun his regrets. As the cold breeze blew away the clouds, moonlight spilled over the lands and Mark saw a sudden and unexpected change requires new interpretation so as to form the most appropriate response for the moment.
As much information as possible is gathered A.S.A.P., and so the post-surprise world might be a little brighter. Or at least more intense for a little bit and in the memory. Maybe you can recall falling some time, and that after the fall it seemed to have happened in slow-motion. I’ve had that happen and couldn’t understand it at the time. I may still not, but my guess is that mid-fall our brain goes: “No wait no wait no wait,” and tries to grab hold of the world by taking in more information than it normally does in that brief timespan. That would create in the memory the likeness of a short film which is so rich that it feels like the moment it captures must’ve lasted much longer.
It isn’t just objects, then, that can serve as Life-Amplifiers; it is happenings and actions, too. While dropping yourself onto a couch or mattress won’t be as surprising, it might still get some blood and chemicals flowing. And it’d be fun.
The converse—inaction, or lack of action—can also amplify life, I found out one simmering Sunday morning.
I’d walked into my university’s sports café after my second Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class. Being neither strong or flexible, I had left the class after 90 minutes of wrestling in what felt like a permanently altered shape. It seemed that, while wrestling, someone had relocated my shoulder. More pressingly, I felt thirsty as all hell, having forgotten to bring my own drink—there’s the inaction—and not entirely trusting the (…chunky?) liquid running through the rusty bathroom faucets during the break. The café hall was full of empty tables, set with only Sunday morning sun. I sat down at the bar, asked for a cola, was granted a cold glass bottle of it and drank.
A choir of angels started singing;
I recalled that Biblical verse: And on the seventh day the Lord paused to enjoy his creation, and He shared a coke with Alex. And He knew that it was good.
And it was good. With a capital ‘God’.
It was a silky liquid equivalent of experiencing the Chewing Gum Effect; it was glorious. Radically refreshing. Thirst’s best friend. (That’s a previous Coca-Cola slogan, actually. I didn’t look that up—the choir sang it to me.)
If hunger and thirst make the next ingestion better, you could make yourself hungry or thirsty beforehand, to enjoy things more. Alternatively, as I don’t know if starving or dehydrating yourself is a healthy strategy for life, you could also restrain yourself in other ways to let the anticipation of an experience build.
A long time ago, when mild torture was still an encouraged methodology in the scientific pursuit of knowledge, the lab-coated people devised an experiment that would come to be known as the devilishly gruesome ‘Marshmallow Test’. In this experiment, marshmallows were exposed to being left alone in a room with a kid. Before leaving, a researcher told the young human-folk, “If you don’t eat that marshmallow, I will give you another one when I get back and you can eat both.”
The test was to see if these kids could delay immediate gratification for later, greater rewards—and what that behaviour predicted about them.
Some ‘failed’ the test, others ‘succeeded’. Decades later follow-up with those previously-child participants showed that the ones who were able to delay their gratification tended to do better in later life. Restraint and patience, then, might not only make an experience more intense, they can even lead to better results. It’s as if people with the ability to restrain themselves are their own Life-Amplifiers.
Happily, I expect most anyone can develop this ability. I myself have come to possess a modicum of restraint—even though by nature I do not belong to the group of people who remain unswayed by the torrents of whimsy. (I do think I would’ve succeeded in that Marshmallow Test, but I would have also refused to eat the second one, baffling scientists until I chose to reveal I just don’t really like marshmallows.)
A question arises as to whether kids would even need additional Life-Amplifiers—they may already perceive the world as superbly intense. Many things are new to them and they are curious; they learn quickly, and existence fills them with so much liveliness that their elders wonder about it and their parents and their marbles are gradually worn down by it.
Then at some point these things change for most, and these children become us.
What is it that takes so much life out of life?
One big thing, I believe, is that we become too settled into what we are; too grounded in worldliness and certainty. Which is easier; being as open and curious as a child all the time would be exhausting. But on the other hand, it’d also be no fun to be so efficient you’re essentially living the same day on repeat.
I’ve had periods like that, where a membrane like that of my sunglasses is put over my entire self, sight, taste, hearing… only the film is thick and rather than beautifying everything, it filters out the invisible spark that makes things what they are. Perhaps it is Life-Obfuscating, dulling the world into one grey ‘something’, to the point I may forget I have the membrane on; then when brushing my teeth at night I realise the day is already over, and it seems like I was brushing my teeth just five minutes before even though that was 24.2 hours ago. And in five minutes I would be brushing my teeth again, 24.3 hours later.
During those periods, one thing that helps me is small external state-changes, which end up helping me redirect internally as well. Maybe I’ll do a familiar thing differently so the comparison helps me extra-enjoy my usual method. Or doing a new thing, and being mindful that I’m doing it.
It doesn’t have to be big and impactful. It doesn’t have to be during periods where I have such manner of sense-dulling blinders on, either. It’s enough if a thing affects my experience of life in a positive way, whenever.
Now that I have delved into this idea, I can implement it more gratuitously. Life-Amplifiers can happen on all levels that life and the experience of it do, from deeply internal to widely external.
Beliefs and attitudes—most internal—influence our experience of life. Perhaps we can learn from children about an attitude of openness and about pure, unadulterated joy. Maybe we can gradually change our beliefs to see even small, normal things as meaningful. And to be optimistic, too; even though I have scarcely been able to recapture that experiential magnitude from the chewing gum that was baptised by Jesus, I don’t lose hope as much anymore. I do not know what I may find next, meaning there’s potential for an equal—perhaps even superior—experience some day. With such hope, the anticipatory search for it is also meaningful, even if that day never comes.
The way we focus on things—which is still internal but closer to the surface—leads to how we see the world and what of it we take in. A practice of mindfulness can help with that; there’s sure to be a thousand little things you haven’t seen yet in your own house, never mind in the outside world. And if you can see more, you can experience more.
Actions and inactions—where internal meets external—can also amplify life, in small and in big ways. My inaction in forgetting my water for a demanding sports class took me by the reins and lead me to the bottle of cola that was purified by the highest order of angels. But there must be many more options for producing comparable results.
Some ideas I’ve come up with: Turn the shower cold for a while before gradually reheating it to enjoy its warm, flowing blanket like never before. Move through your house crawling for a daypart and then appreciate the fact you can walk, if you can. Brush your teeth with your weak hand; lay on the ground before your soft mattress; go outside when it’s cold or raining. Change your diet so you feel better, move better and have the energy to be more child-like in worthwhile endeavours.
(Big changes, like health improvement, tend to happen over time, and can therefore go unnoticed. Mindfulness can help with appreciating that, too, and so can comparing yourself to who you were at some point before. Do the mental exercise where you imagine as realistically as you can being on your deathbed or at your own funeral, then open your eyes and you may find the sun to shine a little brighter and the air to be more refreshing than it was.)
External tools can also amplify life—chewing gum; vividifying sunglasses; sensory deprivation tanks; turning up the volume of your favourite song, or getting better earphones. And mayhap a million other things.
Lastly—most externally—is other people. Having children, for example, is a tiresome affair; yet many parents will say parenthood is the best thing in their lives. Beyond the heavily meaningful responsibility of nurturing a life, they also share in the joys that their children experience. But let’s not shirk easiness; maybe you could give someone a gift instead of a child and share in their subsequent joy.
Because now that we have delved a bit into the idea of Life-Amplifiers together, you might enrich your own life with them but also the lives of others. Maybe you can surprise somebody.
Maybe you can go on a quest for more Life-Amplifiers, and make that quest exciting; maybe you can take people with you on the quest.
Maybe you can write an essay about it.
Ah—!
