I’m still not feeling right from last weekend’s gluten-ing (similar to The Shining), so today’s menu has consisted only of tea.
Luckily, I love tea.
Growing up, tea mostly meant weak Lipton in bed when I was too sick for anything else, often accompanied by dry toast or saltines. The occasional Celestial Seasonings brew would slip in – I don’t remember the flavors, but there’s definitely something familiar about their Lemon Zinger.
In high school, my pretentious intellectualism (fueled by the mid-90’s cultural infatuation with Zen and the new-fangled internets) turned me on to green tea. I brewed a thermos-ful each morning and toted it everywhere I went; my chemistry teacher insisted it looked like urine, which made me all the more certain I was on a steady path to enlightenment, far too subtle and special for the untrained mind.
Tea marketing exploded around the same time, with Tazo and the Republic of Tea neck in neck. I purchased a Bodum teapot and entered the world of the loose leaf while my peers learned to suckle at the sweet Chai syrup pump offered by good mother Starbucks.* I reveled in the exotic, esoteric mysteries of tea (likely my first foray into culinary anthropology) – the precision, the elements of chance and surprise that shaped the flavor of each cup, the magical and ancient discovery of these dried, fermented leaves.
I learned all the ins and outs of tender white tea, robust black tea, my cherished green tea, rich and strange oolong. Tea from twigs, tea with nuts and berries, tea from herbs, tea that begins as tiny balls and unfurls into tiny, delicate banners. I became quite the tea snob, shunning the likes of Teavana and dragging my oh-so-patient boyfriend up to Boston to visit Tealuxe (for some reason, my tea mecca of 1997).
Alas, tea and I drifted apart when I moved away to college. Everything was expected to be functional, so only the reliable echinacea and clover teas found a home in my pantry. There was no time for the foolishness of flavor, and coffee was much quicker when I needed a brain boost.
Gifts of tea still trickled in (the replacement for Bath and Bodyworks gift sets, it seemed, as the de facto acquaintance-level present), growing dusty and impatient in the back of unlit shelves. Each time I moved, the tea was toted along, often long past its prime.
When my Wonderful Boyfriend and I merged households, we needed an entire pantry shelf for the tea we had each accumulated over the years. In the commotion of new love, tea’s slow boil-and-steep ritual was easily brushed aside. As we have mellowed, this forgotten friend has found its place at our table – iced and sometimes flavored in the hot summers, crisp and green on quite mornings, fruity and bold in the afternoons. And I wonder: was I really too busy all this time for a cup of tea? I wish I would have accepted tea’s invitation more often to pause for a few minutes and just wait, just be, rather than rushing ahead for more, more, more.
And that is where the distraction comes in. I have again been guilty of distracting myself from what matters, often with a sneaky ally of what-matters-in-sheeps’-clothing. If I don’t have time for a cup of tea, if I have to press onward and the urgency is unending, I’ve gotten myself off track once again. Whatever is real will be there when the dust settles, and it will be there even if you look away; it’s not in a spreadsheet or a mindmap or a race time or a calendar. It’s lucky, really, because what’s real is much stronger than any of those, just a bit more enigmatic in its nature.
It seems sometimes like it’s the American way – push on and the problems will disappear, find a way to escape and you’ll feel better without any of the nasty contemplative parts. The problem with escape is that you’re always on the run.
(No running pun intended. And, no thinly veiled confession that I plan to quit running – I am still running.)
*Yes, I know that Starbucks chai is no longer a syrup – trust me, I worked there back when it was still cool.
It’s always the quiet ones, right? I thought this job change would be a piece of cake, but now I find many things about my world topsy-turvy.
