The other day I was making a pot of tea, and I wasn’t
really paying a whole lot of attention to the task at hand. So to speak.
Meaning, I was thinking about something not involving
pouring boiling water out of a kettle and into a teapot. (I don’t have no truck
with using tepid or even pre-boiling water for making tea.) Kettle in one hand
with stream of extremely hot water arcing out, tab of tea bag in other (you
know, so the tail doesn’t swoosh into the pot and then you have to pick it out
with your fingers because you’re too lazy to go get a spoon).
So it really wasn’t a huge surprise when I overshot the
pot and splashed the water onto my hand. It was kind of interesting, though,
because part of me detached to observe everything that was going on.
There’s a fleeting moment—that nanosecond where you see
the water careening off the exterior of the teapot and headed for your
hand—when you realize that this is not going to end well, but it’s too late to
do anything about it, prevention-wise. And then the very instant that the water
strikes your fingers, just as the pain receptors are firing up to your brain,
time freezes just long enough so you think, “You know—the time for
concentrating on what’s happening was about seven seconds ago, not now.”
And then you shoot into all kinds of action—slamming the
kettle on the stovetop, whipping your hand away and flapping it about, dancing
around the kitchen and howling. There are also a few words that your mom might
not be happy about.
I will say this—pouring boiling water on your hand turns
out to be an effective method of taking your mind off back pain. However, I
don’t really recommend it as a regular therapy.
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