Coffee pot epiphany

I own a little Gourmia coffee maker that I absolutely love. It’s a 5-cup pot that I can program to start brewing at 5:15 so that I can smell it when my alarm goes off in the morning and a cup is ready to be poured when I finally peel myself out of bed. It had been a while since I had used it. I had been using an old Nespresso machine to make iced lattes every morning. A few weeks ago, maybe because of the cold and the darkness in the morning, I decided to go back to normal drip coffee. I bought some locally roasted beans and started programming my coffee maker again. I love it. But, the last couple of weeks, I did notice that when I pour the water into the machine, it pours down the side of the pot and gets all over my countertop. I have to get paper towels, dry the counter, and clean up the mess. It can get a little annoying, but it’s mostly just inconvenient. No big deal. It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for a good cup of coffee that’s ready to go in the morning.

Today, I was having a bit of a slow evening. I ate my dinner, washed my dishes, and decided to set my coffee maker for the morning so I could stay out of the kitchen for the rest of the night. This evening, without even really knowing it, I poured the water slower. I let it lightly flow into the back of the machine rather than trying to dump a lot of it all at once. I stared at the water as it went in and when the water was gone, I looked down, and my counter was dry. No clean up necessary. So many thoughts hit me at once. All I had to do was slow down, pour gently, and I wouldn’t create such a mess. I don’t know why I hadn’t realized it or thought of it sooner. I then thought about how that might apply to real life. So many of us live in a hurry. We rush through so much of life, oftentimes, aware of the fact that it leads to a mess and yet, we continue to do it anyway. We inconvenience ourselves by rushing things. Anything. If we would only slow down, be more gentle, we might make a lot less of a mess and cause ourselves a lot less trouble.