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If you are like the majority of Americans, you haven’t started your day until you have had a cup of coffee. Statistics show that as of 2019, 64% of Americans drink coffee and consume upwards of 146 BILLION cups per year. An approval rating like that would make even the best of politicians jealous.
Whether you are brewing at home or picking it up at the drive through on your way to work, chances are you are using it exclusively for the caffeine. While controversial as if to do this is beneficial, and in some cases necessary for some of us to function, the pick-me-up we get from consuming coffee is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the potential well-being that coffee can bring to the mind and the soul.
Coffee has a way of connecting us to the places and people of the world that go far beyond getting caffeine to trick the adenosine receptors in our brains into convincing us that we aren’t tired.
As James Clear writes about in his book Atomic Habits, what we do over and over each day shapes our lives and by making small incremental changes to those habits, we can reap big rewards.
What follows is my challenge to you to take drinking coffee, a seemingly mundane task that you are already doing every day, and use it as a trigger to take 5 minutes out of your packed schedule to think about something in your life that brings you fulfillment.
Here is how one simple bean, ground and roasted, has affected me in a positive way and helped me make the most of my daily life.
Coffee as a Global Phenomenon
While it is debatable whether caffeine is scientifically addictive, most who drink it will anecdotally tell you that it indisputably is. Travel, it seems to me, also falls into this category and this 2017 article in Condé Nast Traveler backs me up on this subject.
Coffee and travel, for me have been intertwined since my first international trip requiring a passport to Central America. Countries like Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras reside at the very beginning of the coffee growing process and connect us to the rest of the world and to each other.
There is a popular leadership exercise in which you ask people to write down everyone responsible for your morning cup of joe. Starting with the coffee farmer to the sugar cane grower to the roaster, distributers, and on and on, you quickly understand that one cup of coffee connects you to hundreds if not thousands of people every day.
More than that, coffee can connect you to various cultures depending on how you take it or prepare it. Each phase of my life has brought coffee to me in a different way.
Growing up in Upstate New York and marrying into an Italian family, making espresso was all about purity of ingredients and consistency. On our first trip to Italy, my Nonna, showing me around the town where she grew up, bought for me my first moka pot for five euros down the street from where she taught Sunday school.
To this day, I only brew Illy or Lavazza espresso in it and follow it up by putting it into an espresso cup you might see at a bar in Italy. I have been known to cheat however and put three shots at once in a cappuccino cup. This would certainly be frowned upon as glutinous in the old country.
When I lived in Miami, I learned Cuban coffee is life. Sharing a colada with friends at a ventana at Café Versailles in thimble size cups brings people together quicker than a game of dominoes in Little Havana.
In Hawaii, it was about connection to the land and the nutrient rich soil of the volcanoes it grows on. Living with the aina (land) grounds people in nature and connects them to the local ecosystem and in the islands, there is an inherent respect for it that is greater than maybe anywhere else in the world.
Each time I prepare coffee in a certain way, I think about the memories of those places and I am instantly transported back to them. While these are my biggest connections to coffee, this story is repeated by others around the world who have experienced it in their own way, in their own culture whether that be in Seattle, Colombia, or Indonesia.
Coffee Conversations and The Third Place
There is no doubt that coffee brings people together. Marrying into an Italian family, it was just a natural thing that coffee was an extension of dinner and a facilitator for carrying on conversation for another hour at minimum.
Interconnectedness has been one of coffee’s greatest gifts over many centuries. The conversations that people have over coffee are wide ranging from catching up with a friend you haven’t seen in 20 years to making a multi-million dollar business deal, to discussing the perplexities of quantum physics before a final exam.
The coffee shop plays a its own role in this as much as the actual coffee. When I was a barista at Starbucks, they focused on promoting “the third place” or that space between work and home that you could stop and decompress before carrying on with the other side of your life.
The third place also gives you that pause in the beginning or middle of the day to stop and re-center yourself and give your own thoughts some space to breathe. The pace of our society is so fast that it can take a real effort to slow down. A break in the coffee shop to simply sip on an espresso and people watch can help you do that.
The coffee shop is also a great place to eliminate other life distractions and focus on something that needs your attention. Look around and you will find folks reading, studying, listening to music or really focusing on that relationship with someone else that needs their full attention.
I often believe you work better when all your senses are awakened and no place does that better than the coffee shop. The minute you walk in the door the aroma hits you from the freshly ground coffee beans. The lighting is inviting and the music relaxing. Immediately there is a sense of belonging and a motivation to be productive.
So no matter how or where you take your next coffee, don’t forget to stop and think about how one little bean has brought so much good into the world. If you’d like to see more on how transformative coffee can be, I recommend “Coffee For All” on Netflix, a documentary that takes you through how coffee has had a profound and transformative impact on people’s lives.
