Just a few thoughts today.

Tea In:  Recently I’ve been brewing a lot of tea in the fantastic tea maker that Breville sent me. {Review forthcoming}. It’s an ingenious contraption that does the work for you and keeps your tea warm for an hour after brewing without over-steeping. You can set it to brew your tea in the morning as you would a coffee maker, which believe me, feels like magic.

While I’m completely enamored by the Breville, some occasions call for a different experience entirely: a slower, more intentional experience. When I’m sad, anxious, or frustrated, tea becomes my savior. In these moments, I’ll simply heat up the hot water and gently place a flowering tea bulb in my glass tea pot. I have a stash of these teas from Numi, as well as some that my brother brought home for me from Vietnam. They look like little round bricks, and remind me fondly of the pellets we’d make in the Geo lab for element analysis. {Nerd!}

But back to the tea making: I pour in the water. And then I sit. And I stare at it bloom in front of me. Reality melts away. I find my sense of wonder. The moment is mine. It makes me smile every time. 

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Tea Out: Most mornings before heading in to the office, I leave my house early to park myself at a coffee shop to get work done. I get in line, order earl grey tea from Hassan, whose smile is infectious. I add a small amount of half and half, head to either the big wooden table or the soft chair in the back, and sit down to write my morning list. Once I have direction, I get started on the hardest task of my day.

I’m not sure when I started the habit, but getting whatever I’m dreading out of the way is always a relief, and frees up my mind to work on all the things that need to get done. I’m thankful to whoever tipped me off to this strategy.

In this hour, I manage to complete my work more efficiently than any other time of the day.  It has become my super-charged hour.  Some people work best in silence, but I love being surrounded by people in a public place. The best way I can explain it: there is something about the morning rush that helps me focus – the constant buzz in the background fills up one of the ever-chattering channels in my brain – thus allowing me to tune out this channel completely.

Tea making is an important ritual for me – I make several cups a day as a way to pause and be present. But in this early hour I’m grateful for someone else making my cup of tea. It provides a sense, of relief – a strong sense that I’m being taken care of. It makes me smile every time.