I take my tea
Kaat Zoetekouw - Karin Elizabeth fotografie
There is no trouble so great or grave that cannot be much diminished by a nice cup of tea. Those are the sentiments of Bernard-Paul Heroux, and they’re echoed by approximately half a billion people every day. Tea is both civilized and civilizing.
Why should that be? I’m going to tell you why. Tea takes time. You cannot rush the making of tea. You must put the water in the kettle and bring it to a boil. The water must be boiling, not boiled, when the tea is introduced to it. Then the tea must be allowed to sit quietly for two to three minutes before it can be consumed. During that entire process, there’s nothing else to do but sit and chat. Or sit and read. Or sit and think. And those activities are the hallmarks of civilization.
Of more immediate moment, though, is the reality that the time spent making tea is time that cannot be spent engaged in making those great and grave trouble of which Heroux speaks worse. Everything must wait until the tea is prepared and consumed, and that quiet period of reflection is generally enough to put the matter into some sort of perspective.
And there it is. The reason Jean-Luc Picard was a more successful Starship Captain than James Kirk. Tea.
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