Drink It Black

Yawning and groggy-eyed, I stumble over to the coffee pot. I’m in a hotel lobby, and need something strong to wake me up and take the edge off the free continental breakfast sloshing around in my stomach. We’ve got another day of driving left, and since it’s my turn first, it’s going to take at least two cups. Given the quality of the breakfast, I’m not looking for much from the coffee and load it up with enough french vanilla cream to turn it into milk. I’m walking away, when I realize that there won’t be any left for the elderly gentleman patiently waiting for me to finish ruining the integrity of my drink. I turn to him just as he’s discovering the coffee’s gone, and I offer him one of my cups as penance. Of course, I’m forced to ask him if he takes it with cream, and that’s when he fixes me with a look.

“You want to know something my wife always used to tell me,” he asks. I’ve been in enough situations with wisdom-bomb dropping elderly men at this point to know that I should nod. “She always used to say, that if you don’t drink it black, you will never know how good coffee can be,” a wry twinkle catches the light in his eye and he continues, “or how bad.” We laugh and he walks away to go check out, as I make my way towards the door. He turns to me one last time as I’m exiting and calls out, “remember! You’ll never know!”

I had a long drive ahead of me to think about this, and the more I did, the more I realized that I hadn’t even been considering how the coffee would taste. I wasn’t drinking it for that, I was drinking it because I was in a situation of caffeine-or-die, and I still can’t bring myself to trust energy drinks. One of my favorite movies, My Dinner with Andre, begs the question, are we simply eating out of a sense of routine without really considering or even tasting our food? “If you’re just eating out of habit, then you don’t taste the food and you’re not conscious of the reality of what’s happening to you,” Andre says.

Mindfulness is all the rage these days as people climb aboard the Zen train (or at least the Americanized/commercialized version of Zen), but what does it mean to really apply the principles of this art of conscientious living? For me, it started with the taste of coffee. Something I’d only regarded in its most basic, utilitarian dimension opened up the way fine red wine does if you let if you’re willing to give it the time to let it breathe. Eating food doesn’t have to just be a necessity, a source of energy, or something we do when we’re bored and on tumblr; eating food can be a celebration of our bodies and what we put into them! Having a relationship with food can be a marvelous thing, and I can certainly attest to a transformation of my meal times by applying this principle to both eating and drinking.

As a result, I’m proud to say that those two cups of coffee were the last non-black cups of coffee I’ve ever had (though I did try a dirty chai last week and it was DELICIOUS).