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Don’t Let Your Tea Get Cold

Don’t let your tea get cold.

Life is busy. You put your head down and charge into work. Hours pass. You’ve gotten work done sure, but you haven’t noticed the passage of time. You’ve failed to take deep breathes and crystallize a moment.

You probably are living inside your head and neglecting your body and its needs. You probably have prioritized tasks and outcomes over people and process.

You’ve let your tea get cold. Don’t.

Tea tastes better warm which means you’re more likely to drink it. And you can’t benefit from tea’s health benefits, its taste, its clarity if you don’t drink it.

What tea are you letting get cold?

Is your tea a gym membership that you never use? Is it the highest thing on your to-do list or the most difficult yet highest impact project? Is it the secret project that tickles your soul, the thing you most want to do but shy away from?

Okakura Kakuzo, the author of The Book of Tea called tea a “religion of the art of life.” Don’t shy away from your tea.

Tea is also ritual.

It’s about capturing the greatness of small things, of detail yet breadth. It’s about the pause before action, about setting right intention, about compounding awareness.

I often brew a pot of tea and forget to drink it. It’s not a total waste as the preparation itself is anchoring, yet my forgetfulness is a product of haste. It’s rooted, for me at least, in an artificial belief that I must always be doing and that the more action I take the more results I produce.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Over the long term the tendency to rush moment to moment will take its toll. Burnout is real. Trust me, I know. I worked 15 hours a day, 7 days a week for 3 years before burnout hit me and I could barely do anything for a week. Even before that crash though it was getting harder to be creative, to take joy in my work. It’s been a long slog back to productive balance when all I had to realize was that “a cup of tea would restore my normality” (from the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).

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Last modified: April 30, 2016

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