The other morning as I sat sipping a cup of hot tea (a rare occasion, being in South East Asia and all..), I was pondering my appreciation for such a novelty. For me, a cup of hot tea is associated with rest. A good cup of hot tea is not to be slurped in a hurry as you scurry from task to task. A good cup of hot tea should be enjoyed slowly. It should be one of several, since a good cup of hot tea should come from a pot of hot tea – again implying planning to spend more time than grabbing a cup and running out the door.
There are many situations in which a good pot of tea can be enjoyed, but all include stepping back from the bustle. It can be enjoyed curled up on a couch with your furry four-legged best friend, or with a well written book. It can be enjoyed across a table with your not-so-furry two-legged best friend, with conversations about life, love, loss, and laughter. It can be enjoyed with a journal and your Bible, and even with a podcast of a favorite teacher or pastor. It can be enjoyed while people watching from your perch in the back corner or balcony of a quirky coffee shop.
In any case, enjoying a good cup (or pot) of hot tea involves a lot more than some water and leaves thrown into a cup. At the same time, it requires a lot less than is usually expected with your drive-through chain cup of coffee. There should be no deadlines, no traffic to fight, no important phone calls to catch up on (unless it is to your two-legged best friend who may be too far to sit across from you at a table), no rushing.
A good cup of hot tea means enjoying the good things in life, taking time to smell the roses, and for goodness’ sake, slow the heck down.
Here you find an example of a great afternoon. A pot of tea, a podcast, and my journal.
I started down this rabbit trail of hot tea thanks to my dear mother – from whom I inherited my appreciation for a good cup of loose leaf hot tea. My dearest mother recently started a blog, which for the record you should all be reading! (Click here to go to her blog)
Anyways, I was reading her blog the other day, giggling at her quips and observations about life and the goings on of our family in small town America. I realized how much I missed writing about simpler things. How much I missed writing altogether. She writes about things like hot tea and spring break and the impending deaths of the roosters in the back yard. She writes about life, honest and simple. No need to impress anyone, no need to be profound. Just putting it out there because she has this need in her to write. Something else she lovingly passed on to me.
So then I realized… something happened on my blog. Somehow, my writing and blogging went from talking about normal life to having to impress. Something about being on this big adventure called the World Race put this unspoken requirement on my blogs. It insisted that if they were not about some profound, life-changing revelation, or about some grand adventure then they were not fit to be a World Race blog. Where on earth did that idea even come from?
It is this type of idea that causes young people (and for that matter old people) back in the States and around the globe to have far different expectations of the World Race than what actually happens. Yes, life on the World Race has its moments of grand revelation, and there are opportunities for fabulous adventures that you might not find at an office job back home. But the World Race is so much more than that.
The World Race is more about the day to day normalness that you somehow find as you settle into life as a Racer. The World Race has far more moments that deal with a never-ending stream of ants coming to and from your house, the gosh awful stench of sewage that somehow keeps filtering up through the bathroom pipes no matter HOW much bleach you pour down the pipes, the speed bump that you stub your toe on every. single. night on your way to and from dinner.
The World Race is just life. Plain and Simple. It just happens to be lived in a setting that happens to provide the occasional adventure, and somehow produces revelations at a quicker pace than elsewhere. And when you limit yourself to writing only about the adventures and revelations, you limit yourself from writing about this life that you are living. The good, the bad, the smelly, the hilarious, the heartbreaking, the questionable, the somehow-this-has-become-normal life that you are living every day.
I wish I had easier access to Internet this month. I don’t know what the next few months will look like on the Internet front. But I do know that I’m sick of only writing about the big things. I long to write about the small things that make up this life I live. I long to take the time to sit back, relax, slow down, and enjoy a pot of tea (preferably literally, but I’ll settle for theoretically depending on the humidity levels of the day). I long to return to enjoying the little things in life, instead of always searching for something “blog worthy”. If my evening entertainment is watching the family of cat-sized rats exploring the neighbors kitchen, then it should be blog worthy. Because it is the life I live. It is beautiful, ugly, funny, boring at times, and above all deserving of being written about if I so choose.
