Tea is a wonderful escape, and I am quite glad I rediscovered this little fact. For a while in the past few years, I was quite confused about why I enjoyed tea so much. Tea was still very nice, a very enjoyable drink, and something I turned to incredibly often. But lately I have started to really see the tea light (sorry for the bad pun).
I've learned when you are wound up like a wind up music box, two things will either happen the spring will come unhinged and it will be incredibly broken, or there will be a decent bit of noise, maybe a bit hectic and out of tune at first, but eventually it might be a nice melody, and then it will eventually come to a rest. Well the problem was for quite some time I kept winding the spring, and my tea sessions were rushed, full of distractions, or honestly just part of the motions paying them next to no mind. So after a few days of frantically having things unwind off in both key and tempo, I think I finally got to the nice melody of my days and stress levels. That melody has never seemed better than just sitting and going through at least 1.5 liters of 80's Puerh on a Friday night over the course of several hours.
This escape through tea, is probably a bad word for it, its more of a escape into yourself in a meditative sense, while digesting your life with tea. When you make the time available to quiet the mind, and just do the tea it really is the soft melody of the music box.
I am reminded of a story told in Novice to Master: [An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity] by Soko Morinaga. Which in all honestly is possibly the best thing to keep in mind when approaching your own life, just remember we are all inherently stupid, and the question is in how many ways can we stop being stupid. But I digress, the story involves his very early days in the monastery in which the focus of the lesson is that their is no waste. Well I have many fellow graduate students that can not comprehend "wasting" as much time as I do drinking tea, I gave into their pressures and tried to turn tea time into productive time. In retrospect, that wasted time was possibly my most productive time so far in my studies, it is my sanity check, my mental reset button, and by extension my productivity boost.
Just as there is no sense beating a dead horse, an overly taxed mind, a stressed out mind, or a frustrated mind can each only become more so, often leading to desperate and stupid attempts to find a solution. A fresh mind is often best for any problem, and for me tea is that mental reset to let me get back to work.
1 comment:
I totally 100% agree with you on this post. For a really long time I drank my tea while doing something else, working, writing, whatever and somewhere along the line I stopped actually enjoying it and I was only drinking it because it was part of my routine. Now I make time everyday to sit and really enjoy my tea and it has become something so important in my life that I don't know how I got by without it. You explained it perfectly. Well said =)
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