Every morning, I brew a cup of coffee. It’s not a couple of teaspoons of instant, swirled around in a hot mug of water with a dash milk at the end so that I can get to my work for the day. My cup of coffee takes 20 minutes to make (and that’s after the kettle has boiled). It’s hand-ground every morning. It’s hand poured through a hand-folded filter.
Some might think: 20 minutes? Hand-grinding? Hand-folded? Who’s got time for that? But for me, making coffee is a ritual, it’s a daily habit in which I find an immense pleasure. It’s a multi-sensory experience – I smell the beans before they are ground, and afterwards, and as they react to the water. The sound of the beans being ground by own steam, the weight of the grind as it moves through the grinder. In fact, the drinking of the coffee at the end is less important than the making of it.
Ritual is the art of turning habit into pleasure. – Chiyo, Memoirs of Geisha.
There are boring bits in every person’s day, all the time. Stuff we ‘just have to do’. But, what if they were rituals, not chores. Might that change that boring stuff – the studio clean up, the emails, the newsletter writing – into something we could take pleasure from?
