Coffee is life

Coffee…

And books, and coffee, and coffee, and books and coffee, that pretty much sums up my weekends these days.

We are New Yorkers, we drink industrial amounts of espresso everyday, it’s the oil that keeps this machine that never sleeps running.

Coffee shops were originally tranquil places, but by 1935 and the rise of espresso culture, they became bars for workers that were looking for a strong caffeine hit. Nowadays, coffee shops are those third places that mark the pace of daily rhythms, where you can find an early hour of calm and caffeinated clarity before the hustle.

As Balzac wrote:

“Coffee glides into one’s stomach and sets all of one’s mental processes in motion. One’s ideas advance in column of route like battalions of the Grande Armée. Memories come up at the double, bearing the standards which will lead the troops into battle. The light cavalry deploys at the gallop. The artillery of logic thunders along with its supply wagons and shells. Brilliant notions join in the combat as sharpshooters. The characters don their costumes, the paper is covered with ink, the battle has started, and ends with an outpouring of black fluid like a real battlefield enveloped in swaths of black smoke from the expended gunpowder. Were it not for coffee one could not write, which is to say one could not live.”

It is rumored he drank up to 50 cups of coffee a day.

And so, on most days, coffee is the calm before the storm. But there is a different type of beauty to the ritual of having coffee at home. Coffee is peacefulness, so it is in this habit that tiny moments of our day are defined.

Coffee is a ritual

Coffee at home is a ritual of slow moments, those moments spent scrolling through the newspaper, a magazine, or reading a book. Those moments are about taking back time, blissful decadent hours spent reading.

These moments remind me of a book I opened because I liked its cover at an airport in Copenhagen, The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking. Hygge, is a danish term defined as “a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being’. It derives from a sixteenth-century Norwegian term, hugga, meaning “to comfort”. Helen Russell, a British journalist who wrote “The year of living Danishly” defines the term as “taking pleasure in the presence of gentle soothing things” like a freshly brewed cup of coffee.

Coffee is clarity.

So coffee at home is almost the opposite of what coffee at a coffee shop is, there is so much to the process of preparing a cup of coffee at home, from the way we perceive the first rays of sunlight entering our homes, to the aroma produced by a freshly brewed cup of coffee, no matter if it’s via a Chemex, Aeropress or a Nespresso machine.

I’ve been writing and rewriting this last paragraph for the last few days, coffee is such an intrinsic part of my life that I didn’t want to do it a disservice. And the more I think back and reflect about it, the clearer it is, that in my life, coffee is also stability. Because in a life in which you’re constantly moving around, starting every morning in a coffee shop has given me a sense of belonging. And so, in these days in which I can’t go to a coffee shop, it is through four or five, or ok, maybe six espressos a day that these days have kept a sense of normality, coffee has kept me grounded.