A friend told me once that coffee equaled real-life to her, while tea represented an escape from life–filled with frills, china, and hats. While I disagreed with her description of taking tea, which I addressed in “Aren’t Tea Parties for Retired Ladies Wearing Red Hats?”, I also disagreed with her description of real life.
- Is your life characterized on a daily basis by what you produce or what you create?
- Do you spend your time as as carefully as you spend your money?
- Is the way to nurture yourself today in your thoughts as much as the deadlines you’re convinced you must meet?
- Do you drive your body and emotions past the boundaries of tiredness and need-for-quiet to exhaustion and frenzy?
- Do you grab and go or sit and savor what you put in your mouth each day?
If you are in life for the long haul and spending time on work you also imagine doing even five years from now, consider…if you haven’t already…what the tea world might offer you. Maybe real life, daily life, doesn’t need to be marked with jolting your body and heart through life. Don’t get me wrong. If I visit Italy, I will enjoy the baristas’ magic with the locals. But daily life, life I can live for the long-haul, is within the tea world.
Fabulous question. I live in a “tea world”, which to me is a world shaped around mindfullness (a favorite catch-word of an art professor I had in college). Tea does not symbolize a victorian way of life for me, but rather a more “deliberate” way of living…that of being constantly aware of your surroundings, and being able to extract enjoyment and relaxation out of them whenever and wherever you may find it (common in many asian philosophies). Drinking tea “deliberately” teaches us to focus on our senses – taste, smell, sight, feel – which then flows into how we percieve the rest of the world around us, enjoying not only the whole, but the smaller parts that make up the whole as well. That doesn’t mean I never feel “stressed”, but I think being of a “tea mind” helps me to deal with it more calmly that I might otherwise, and I think drinking as much tea as I do reminds me to slow down and find beauty wherever I can.
I don’t drink coffee…I can’t even stand the smell. So I can’t comment to what a “coffee world” might be like. I’m sure there must be somewhere in Italy to get a good cup of tea though. 🙂