Rituals

This post is my entry for August’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by the person typing these words.

I’m a systematic thinker. I have many processes and frameworks for how I approach life. Those frameworks have modules and the processes follow a routine. All of those repeatable action sequences accomplish tasks and make my life stable and consistent where it adds value. None of those things are rituals. I have few rituals, and I’m writing about just one of them today; coffee.

Coffee has been part of my life since I was a kid. I’d drink it in the mornings that I’d tag along with my dad to work (which was often). I’d drink it throughout college and into the workforce. Furthermore, I have always had an appreciation for coffee as a beverage that was stronger than most. This all predates the “coffee craze” once there was a Starbucks on every corner and now tons of competing coffee brands springing up to give that Seattle Siren a run for her buckets of money. Coffee did not become a ritual for me until about 15 years ago. That’s when I started to educate myself on bean quality, freshness, variety and the various methods of grinding and brewing. That’s when coffee consumption went from good to out-fucking-standing for me, and when coffee itself went from the scale of love interest to passionate soulmate.

I took a pause in writing this post at this moment to go make a cup.

As rituals go, the steps are simple for mine. They can be summarized as follows:

1. Weigh coffee beans.
2. Grind coffee beans.
3. Pour hot water on ground coffee beans.
4. Enjoy drinking delicious coffee.

I’ve detailed the tools I use for this ritual on my Uses page, but that’s not the point of this post. What makes this ritual special and worthy of ritual status isn’t how simple the process can be written. The ritual is about the feelings that the process evokes as it is executed. I use a scale to weigh the beans, but I can normally nail the 20g mark by eyeballing the beans before seeing the reading. I can see if the grind is too fine or coarse based on how the water flows through the bed to the bottom of the V60 and into the cup. For me, making a cup of coffee has evolved from a set of actions to support the enjoyment of drinking it to a ritual that brings enjoyment at every moment in the experience.

Someone pointed out to me that what makes this ritual enjoyable is the little bits of control that are represented throughout. I do tend to agree that my mind does enjoy the structure and the control, however, it isn’t the sole reason. The aroma of the coffee during each phase of production. The sounds of the grinder completing its task. The satisfying landing of the grounds in the cone filter. The beauty in the bloom of that first pour. The slow and sultry retreat of the water as it recedes to reveal the grounds once again between pours. The heat against my face as I take the first sip. It’s all of it. It brings a calm and happiness to my mind and my soul that I can’t imagine being as complete if I weren’t invested in the process. I rarely get coffee while out of the house these days because it feels like a degraded experience. It checks the box for the nostalgia of a truck stop or restaurant cup of coffee, but it lacks the richness of my ritual.

Making a cup of coffee is the ritual that grounds me (pun intended).