Energy

Revised 2 times, last 25 September 2026.

Energy, as most people meet the word, is a substance. It flows along channels, the way water moves through a pipe, it can become blocked, and the blockage causes the trouble, it can drain away, leaving a person depleted, it can be cleared, by a practitioner with the right hands or the right intention, or protected, by shielding, by boundaries drawn in the air. It can even be given, one person to another, across a room or across a phone call, and the giver is diminished by the transaction while the receiver is filled.

This is the picture behind the cards in the shop window and the vocabulary of the video watched at 2am The language is physical throughout: low energy, high energy, a surge, a leak, a bottleneck. The person speaking it is usually trying to be helpful, and the image is intuitive, anyone can picture a reservoir with a crack in its side. But the picture implies an adjustment. If energy is a substance, then someone can be arranged correctly around it, the practitioner, the healer, the coach, the friend who notices you are running on fumes. The trouble is located in the arrangement, and the remedy is a rearrangement performed by another pair of hands.

What I have noticed, and this may only be true of how I use the word, is that the substance picture is rarely what anyone is actually describing. They describe a shift, a change in how much a person can take on, how easily they pick up where they left off, whether a conversation holds or dissolves. And they will still say the word energy while describing it, because it is the word that is there, and the shift they mean is not quite the same thing as water moving through a pipe, though the picture does some of the work for them without their noticing.

Energy, in this vocabulary, is not a stuff. It does not sit somewhere in a person and get drained into the air, nor does it arrive from outside and pool in the chest like water filling a basin. I use the word for capacity: the ability to move between states, from alert to still, from one kind of attention to another, and to do so without something having to be added or removed first.

What a person would notice if the word applied is responsiveness. When capacity is present, a room changes the effort it takes to be in. A conversation can be held without rehearsing it beforehand. A difficult thing can be sat with without it accumulating into a weight. When capacity is low, the same conversation drains, and sitting with anything becomes a task in itself.

The only currency energy is ever paid in is attention. Nothing else is exchanged for it, and nothing else is spent to recover it. A person who is tired is not, in this sense, running out of a substance; they are unable to spend attention the way they could an hour ago, and the difference is measurable in what they can notice and what they cannot. This is why I do not describe energy as flowing, blocking, or draining, though people do, and though those pictures are pictures of something real rendered in the wrong medium. The word does work if it is read as a description of movement rather than of material.

Focus is the first place energy can be watched working. A person sits down to read or to sort through a day's work, and the difference between having energy and not is visible in whether attention keeps its shape. When it is present, the thing in front of them stays in the foreground while everything else waits quietly at the edge. When it is spent, that holding loosens and the mind starts collecting other things, not because the work matters less but because there is less capacity to keep it where it was.

Grief shows the same thing differently. After a loss, the capacity goes towards the thing that is no longer there, and it can go there all day. That is not a state that needs correcting; it is where the energy has put itself. What is noticeable is that it returns when it returns, without a schedule, and that the person can watch that happen from inside the movement. Some mornings it turns back to the ordinary day as though nothing had happened, and some nights it goes back out the door it came in through, and neither visit is guaranteed.

In both cases the substance picture gets in the way. A person who believes energy can be drained or replenished by someone else tends to look for the mechanism of transfer. The thing actually available to notice is simpler: where the capacity is going, and whether it is going where the person wants it to go.

Energy depends on presence, because the movement between states is only available to anyone if something is noticing it as it happens. A person can shift from alert to still, from one kind of attention to another, without ever registering the shift, and in that case the word energy describes nothing they can point to. The capacity is still doing its work, but it is invisible, and an invisible capacity is no more useful than an absent one. Presence is what makes the movement legible: it is the noticing that turns a change in direction into something a person can describe, as far as they can, in words like "the room took less effort to be in" or "I felt less able to hold that thought."

It stands against noise, which is what capacity becomes when it is spent without being directed anywhere in particular. A day can consume a person completely, absorbing other people's demands, keeping up with the pace of things arriving, and at the end of it there is no movement to point to, no state they arrived at, no shape they held. What was spent was real, and it was energy, but it went nowhere that could be named. Noise is that expenditure: the difference between being busy and having moved through something. The two are not opposites in the sense that one is good and the other is bad, because a person can be full of noise and feel fine, and a person can be quiet and spent. The difference that matters is whether the capacity went somewhere, and whether the going was noticed.

The word energy breaks where it suggests a reservoir. The substance picture depends on there being something inside a person that can be measured, topped up, or depleted by someone else's presence or absence. That implies a tank with a level, and a level that can be adjusted from outside by the right hands or the right intention. What I can notice, after watching the word do its work long enough, is that nothing is added or subtracted in the way that picture requires. Attention changes direction. That is all. A person does not run out of energy the way a kettle runs out of water; their attention leaves the thing that mattered and settles on the thing that is loud, or the thing that is familiar, and the room feels drained because nothing is arriving anymore.

This is the difference between having capacity and being able to use it, and it is the part the word cannot carry. A person can have the capacity to hold a difficult conversation and still be unable to spend it, because something else has claimed the attention first. The capacity sits there unused, not diminished in any measurable way but unavailable all the same. The substance picture has no room for that gap. In that picture, either the tank is full or it is not, and there is no third option where the water is there and the tap is blocked by something the person cannot name.

So the remedy language that follows from the reservoir picture, clearing, protection, replenishment, all of it, describes rearranging furniture in a house where the actual change was that someone stopped looking into one room. You can clear the blockage by moving the furniture. The room stays where it is, and the person who was not looking into it still is not looking into it, and the rearrangement has not changed where their attention goes.

What the word energy can hold is capacity, movement, the difference between focus and grief, the way attention arrives and the way it withdraws, What it cannot hold is the idea that there is a quantity of it to be guarded or refilled, because there is not one. What there is, is where you are looking, and whether the looking can be noticed as it happens.