Galvanized

This morning I made my bed upon rising, fetched the paper without failing to notice the birds in all their glory, and enjoyed homemade pancakes for the first time in ages. New Year’s Day. If only I could be so galvanized every morning. Galvanized. I mentioned this word repeatedly on our long drive back and forth to Little Rock last week. That peculiar state of being energized in such a way as to practically guarantee creative action. Why, I wondered aloud during our road trip, why was I so creatively ablaze during certain periods of my life, while during others the inner flame flickered so faintly? Why was rock music so especially good in the 1960s, and then again in the 1990s? Why does greatness seem to be as much a product of the times as of the will and talent of individual human beings?

It was in the eighteenth century when Luigi Galvani discovered that a frog’s legs could be made to twitch in an electric field. A dead frog, no less. It is said that the discovery was accidental, that Galvani and his assistant were using frog skin to experiment with static electricity when a charged scalpel made contact with the exposed sciatic nerve of a recently skinned frog. As to what happened next, I will quote directly from Wikipedia, because the phrasing is just too perfect:

“At that moment, they saw sparks and the dead frog’s leg kicked as if in life.”

What a sentence! The first sentient being to be galvanized–a dead frog in 1771!

Well here I am—a human being and very much alive—inspired by the boldness of the number “1,” by the ring of the word “galvanized,” and by the fresh coffee straight from my brand new French press. Is it yet another fleeting swell of the flame caused by nothing more than some excess static charge in the air? Maybe so. But why not forge what we can while the flame is high?