You’ve just stumbled out of bed, slowly emerging from the dark syrup of sleep, your mind a fogged window. In the hall or kitchen stands someone who’s been awake for hours, upright, caffeinated, and burning conversational octane at a high rpm. They greet you with that buoyant, easy cheer that can only radiate from a warm engine. You answer in fits with nods or syllabic fragments, and instantly everyone in the vicinity, save the severely autistic, perceives the imbalance.
Among civil strangers this scene seldom unfolds. The rules of engagement of polite company force the sleepy to accelerate into a higher gear. But among those known to one another, these rules fall away, and the laws of physics take over. The relative silence of the retort creates a vacuum abhorred by nature. The cheerful one presses on, their words now propelled less by goodwill than by suction. The newly awakened resists, shrinking further into stillness, and the interaction spirals with lightness turning to friction, affection to annoyance.
Viewed as conversation, the exchange looks like a failure. One person overreaches, the other withdraws, and goodwill curdles into irritation. Seen through physics, nothing is wrong at all. Energy is merely moving as it must from the warmer body to the cooler, from motion toward rest. What feels, in human terms, like miscommunication is in natural terms a return to balance.
If we borrow the language of physics:
ΔH (heat differential) → Q (energy transfer)
Energy flows along the gradient because it must; not from will or temperament, but from the universe’s bias toward equilibrium. Resistance creates friction and friction its own heat. In the end, both bodies settle near the same temperature, either both cooling or combusting. The system will be balanced.
I’ve lived on both sides of this equation: as a son, being talked at before language had returned to me; and as a father, unable to stop myself from provoking that same bleary resistance. Vows to break the cycle notwithstanding, we must all obey the laws of Nature.
In the end, it isn’t about mood but momentum. The cheerful can’t help radiating; the groggy can’t yet absorb. The exchange plays out until the system settles, as all systems do, back toward balance, one cooling, the other warming, both natural, both human.
SEÑOR - The Blog 