Election Stress and Mind-Expanding Tea

If you're nervous like me, here's something else to think about.

Photo by Reba Spike on Unsplash

Dear reader,

I am as nervous as a cat in a handbasket about the election. I think everyone in America is, and I have reason to believe people outside of America are pretty nervous too. But I don’t want to talk about that right now. It’s very early in the morning, and everyone in my house is still asleep. I’m sitting here at my desk with my cup of coffee. The Indigo Girls are singing “Romeo and Juliet” in my head. It’s nice. So let’s not talk about the election.

Instead, I want to tell you about an interview I did many years ago, early in my writing career. I was researching an article for a magazine (now defunct) about mindfulness in everyday life. The premise was that most people don’t have the time or inclination to engage in a full meditation practice, but that anyone can become more mindful in their daily activities and benefit from it. A sense of calm, a sense of connectedness, all those good things. The interview was with Sharon Salzberg, who is a pretty famous meditation teacher and author of many books. I can remember being surprised and delighted that she agreed to get on the phone with me, a relatively unserious person. Back then I used to put my infant son in his swing so I could do interviews, and if he woke up, I’d run out of the room and wrap the call up as fast as I could so that whoever I was on the phone with wouldn’t hear his baby noises and know just how unserious I was.

Anyway, that infant is now nineteen, and I’ve forgotten most of what Salzberg and I talked about. But one thing stuck with me, and I think about it a lot actually.

Salzberg teaches something she calls a tea meditation. If you search her name and the word tea, you can easily find various versions of it online. There’s even a guided quickie audio version on the New York Times website where she talks you through it in her very calm and stress-reducing voice. But basically, instead of drinking your tea (or coffee or whatever) and scrolling on your phone or stressing about the state of the nation, you focus your attention on the tea and the process of drinking it. You notice the smell of the tea, the warmth and weight of the cup in your hands, the taste, while dismissing thoughts of judgment and the future and anything outside of that moment.

The part that I liked best, the part I’ve been thinking about all these years—which isn’t actually included in the New York Times audio for some reason—was about appreciating the tea and everything it took to bring it to your cup. She talked about thinking backward through each step. So if you bought your tea at the store, for example, you take a moment to appreciate the person who put it on the shelf. Depending on where your tea comes from, getting it to the store probably involved several steps and many people to appreciate—someone driving it on a truck, a ship with many people carrying it across an ocean, loading and unloading it in crates. And then the people and processes involved in drying, picking, and growing the tea. In your mind, you can work all the way back to a farm somewhere with tea plants growing in the sun.

I love that image of tea leaves bending toward the light.

The thing about tea is that it’s relatively simple. It’s just leaves. The exercise can be done with anything you drink or eat or consume. Depending on what that is, it can get tricky. You might not end up with plants growing in the sun. But my point—the thing I have carried with me all this time—is that something as small as a cup of tea connects me to all the people along the way who I will surely never meet but who nonetheless have made a little contribution to my life through their efforts.

Today, in these divisive times, it’s so easy to disconnect from other people. It’s so easy to think everyone is an asshole. I’ve thought it myself many times. And whether that’s true or not, the fact is that everything connects us to a lot of different people and their efforts. The coffee in my cup, the clothes I’m wearing, the chair I’m sitting in, everything around me. Taking a moment to appreciate these people and their work expands me and draws me into the present moment and really does alleviate some of the stress.

Later today, when my nineteen-year-old baby and I are standing in line at the poll, I’m going to try to appreciate the connections. We’ll see how it goes.

Thank you for reading, and, for goodness sake, if you’re in the U.S. then don’t forget to vote!

Melinda