Instinct — when the house burns down one forgets even one's own dinner. — Yes: but one retrieves it from the ashes.

Crisis lifts us from our petty needs. Survival and the processing of trauma take over, and the mundane concerns feel irrelevant.

Yet once the shock wears off, the "animal" self returns. We cannot live in a state of crisis forever. This is the desperate, and perhaps grotesque, reclamation of normalcy.

One never forgot the dinner. It is just that the house burning down acted as an amnesia. As a result, the hunger was suspended.

@temursolief