This morning began as any normal Saturday morning does. I woke up, headed downstairs, and put on a kettle to make some freshly brewed French press coffee. I've been using Four Sigmatic mushroom coffee and a friend of mine recommended that I try out his ratio to better reap the cognitive benefits of the mushrooms (non-psychedelic, of course).
As the allotted time for the recipe came to a close and I pressed the plunger, I pulled out one of my favorite coffee cups: an ornate, gold leafed china cup from Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany. From the start of the pour, I knew I was in trouble. The steamy coffee gradually creeped up the side of the cup, closing in the on lip. All the while, the liquid in the carafe was draining, approaching the bottom at a perceptible rate.
It became clear with less than a centimeter from the top of the cup that the coffee would be brimming. Now, this isn't generally the worst thing in the world, but I don't like black coffee. I prefer to add milk or cream, but there was no room and I can't drink blisteringly hot coffee to sip it down. While I waited on the coffee to cool, I added some cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and cardamon. As the spices floated on the surface of the brimming cup I made another startling realization: I can't stir the spices in because a spoon would displace volume in the cup, resulting in an overflow.
This left me no choice: I had to lean down and slurp all of the freshly sprinkled spices. A blend of powdered cinnamon and hot black coffee sloshed against the back of my palate; not the best flavor in the world, but also not the worst. Then came the biting flavor of the cloves and nutmeg, followed by the delicate, but overpowering cardamon. It tastes like a burnt, sugar-free cinnamon role dunked in a cup of black diner coffee.
After I suffered through the first inch or so of coffee and spice clumps, I finally had the room in the cup to add milk, drop in a spoon, stir the remaining spices in, and take my first enjoyable sip of the not-so-warm brew.
Sipping on coffee, I reflected on the events that had transpired. The whole twisted scenario felt a lot like life. Your life, your time, is the cup. There are essentially two constraining modes in life: empty and filled up.
1) If your cup is empty, you have ample opportunity to fill it up and to add things to a not-so-busy life.
2) If your cup is brimming, you can't add anything. If you do, it'll just overflow and run out of the cup. You might be able to add certain things to your cup, but it's at the expense of the things already in the cup.
Things get more interesting when you look beyond the fullness of the cup. I tried to add some spices to the cup. These would be things that could improve all of the substance in the glass. But if your cup is full, you can't add those spices. It's the same with busyness in life: if you're so busy that you can't add any spices to life, you'll forever be stuck with bland, black coffee.
Even if you have room in your cup for those spices, if you don't have a way to mix them in, they'll never be able to be integrated into the whole contents of the cup. You'll never have a homogenous mixture. Mixing in spices requires a spoon, but in life the spoon is a change of routine or structure. If you don't have the bandwidth to experiment with disrupting your routine, then it doesn't matter what spices you add to life; you will never be able to fully integrate them.
The final thing I added to my coffee was milk. Milk, cream, butter: all of these additions make coffee more palatable. The same is true of life: without the room in your cup to add something that makes the rest of the contents more enjoyable, you're stuck with bland, boring, black coffee. In life, milk would be the extracurriculars that make things a bit more exciting: vacations, new hobbies, intramural sports leagues. But the catch is that, even if you have the room to add the milk, you still need to have the room to add the spoon so you can properly mix the milk into the coffee.
While it may sound superfluous to conflate Saturday morning coffee with the concept of an overburdened life, the parallels are quite apparent. As I go into a new week, I plan to be more aware of how full my cup really is so I can make sure I have room for the spices of life, the milk that softens the acridity of life, and the spoon that enables you to mix the former into your very busy life. By maintaining a healthy fullness of your cup, you're able to pursuing crafting the perfect concoction of what life has to offer.
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