Tea Time
Hey, good to see you again. Sit back, kick your shoes off and enjoy the story.
tomk32
The wind whipped my hair back and whistled in my ears as we came round the last bend. Udo was already breathing hard, but he hadn’t slowed down a bit. He knew this stretch. He knew that we still had a few hundred meters or so before we reached the top of the hill and he wasn’t going to even think about stopping until then. I had given him his head and was enjoying the feeling of his massive shoulders reaching up and forward with every stride as we galloped up the hill through the snow. The sweet smell of warm horse and fir trees mingled in my nose and the tears from my eyes streaked straight back into my hair, freezing immediately. I guessed our speed to be about mach 9 as we topped the hill. We then slowed to a canter, a trot, and stopped and turned to look back just in time to see my friend Nicole gallop up. Niklas was not far behind her, barking and panting wildly. ‘Let’s do it again! Let’s do it again!’, he seemed to say.
But it was cold and it was getting dark, so Nicole and I decided to walk back to the barn, feed the horses and have some tea. We could sit in the club room and warm up while they were having their dinner. A hot cup of tea and a functional heater was the nicest way I knew of to end a winter ride in the woods.
We quickly unsaddled and filled the buckets with odd assorted ingredients, supplements, warm water (it was cold outside) and a few apples and carrots (for the vitamins) and carried them out to the waiting horses. And while Nicole swept out the grooming area, I went into the club room to turn on the heater and make tea. I rummaged around the cabinets a bit and found some cranberry tea and the last two clean mugs. One was new and shiny, sporting a smiley and some silly saying and the other one was a typical barn mug – cracked and stained, something somebody had weeded out of their own kitchen years ago, but still whole and useful. I poured the tea into the mugs, set them on the table and went out to get a tissue for my nose.
I came back in to find Nicole sitting in front of the heater with a steaming mug between her hands. ‘I left you the good tea’, she said generously. I looked over at the table and saw the shiny smiley mug steaming all alone. ‘What?’, I said. I wasn’t sure what she meant. ‘I left you the good tea’, she repeated. ‘I took the bad tea and left you the good one.’ She showed me the old, stained mug in her hands.
‘But it’s the same tea’, I said. ‘They’re both cranberry tea. They came out of the same pot.’
‘I know. But the one mug is nicer.’
Isn’t that silly – thinking that the one tea is better than the other just because the mug is nicer. The mug has nothing to do with the tea. A strange sort of thing to think.
Or is it?
Maybe many of us think this. If life is tea, then money, houses, cars and stuff like that are mugs. These things, just like mugs, only surround our lives, they don’t define our lives. And the quality of our life has very little to do with the kind of mug it’s in.
If we only focus on the mug, we run the risk of not enjoying the tea. Granted, a nice new smiley mug can be great to look at, but alone it’s empty. It’s the tea that warms, soothes and pleases.
Enjoying your life, and your tea, doesn’t mean that your mug has to be new and perfect, an old stained one will hold just as much. So look past your mug and let the flavors flow.
Happy tea time,
Lisa
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Lisa, you are on a roll, this is another great story to illustrate your point.
Hmm, it is all about the tea indeed, things in life are just cladding and how little do we know it.
What I see it that people here make big houses and leave little room for a garden these days.
Such a shame as everything grows so abundantly around here and yet all you have are concrete suburbs because of the bigger good tea cups.
The irony that at the moment I too live in a big tea cup however there is a huge garden around it, thank goodness.
Wilma Ham´s last blog ..Learning to observe my Little Voice, my ego.
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Lisa Reply:
January 27th, 2010 at 6:39
Wilma, I really see this a lot. It seems that we are so very preoccupied with the trappings and the claddings that we forget to look at the insides. We forget that life is about enjoying – but not enjoying the stuff, instead about enjoying the moments, the experiences, the relationships and such. These experiences are formed by our values and beliefs – I suppose those are mixed in the tea leaves, just to give the tea a really rich flavor.
The big houses are but shells. There’s nothing bad about them, per se, but getting so involved in owning them and keeping them slows us down and deadens our taste buds. It really does life no justice to focus on these things. When we breathe our last breaths, we most certainly won’t think back on how lovely the sitting room was – and if we do, then what a waste! I want to think back on all the fun I had, the people I knew, the conversations we had and all the lovely moments in life I experienced. I want to taste, form and enjoy my values, my beliefs, my relationships and my experiences. These things make up my tea. And I’d like to think of how good it was when I draw my final breath.
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Wilma’s right – people these days are too caught up in the trappings to notice what really matters. I try to live my life without the trappings, but sometimes it’s easy to fall into that mind set.
Michelle´s last blog ..Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming
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Lisa Reply:
January 28th, 2010 at 6:26
That’s true, Michelle. Many people are caught up in their mugs. I agree, it’s very easy to fall into this trap – you easily accept the value systems of society, as you hear, read and see it often enough. This is also why it is important to invest time and energy into the development of yourself. It’s hard to follow your own values if you don’t know what they are.
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I’ve been in a tea phase myself. It seems a little less frenetic on my heart …
robert v sobczak´s last blog ..
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Lisa Reply:
January 28th, 2010 at 6:27
Hello Robert,
I think we all have been in tea phases and in mug phases. The tea phases are not just less frenetic, they’re also generally more satisfying (at least for me that is).
Thanks for commenting.
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Good post… I’m always on the lookout for good blogs.
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Lisa Reply:
February 1st, 2010 at 6:20
Thanks!
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I confess to being a sucker for a pretty package, but at heart, I really only want the tea. And there is something warm and inviting about the old, used mug…
Jane´s last blog ..Chocolate Crisis #3,287
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Lisa Reply:
January 31st, 2010 at 10:52
Isn’t there though? I love old mugs and old sweaters. New and shiny is fun sometimes too, but there is a certain comfort in the unpretentious and, well, old. :-)
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Nice point! New mugs are tempting, though old mugs are more intimate. Regardless the mug, tea is the essence. Let’s try to make it better… Keep writing!
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I get what you are saying; but I think that you are contradicting a later post that you wrote, in which you were agonizing over what to wear to a presentation. In that post, you wanted to give the “right” impression to a client; and contemplated what to wear to the interview that would send the signal that you were up to the job.
By your own admission, obviously, the metaphorical tea cup matters at least some of the time.
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