I’m still coffee-less.

I won’t further bore you with the medical details, but for reasons of pressing health management I have not been drinking coffee for over a month. I haven’t been avoiding caffeine, per se, but given that coffee was my major source of the stimulant I have simultaneously come close to clearing that out of my diet, too.

In other word, January was a helluva month, and February is off to about the same vibe as January.

As has been my routine for the last twenty-five odd years or so I have started my day with a cup of joe. My tastes for what goes in that coffee has shifted and changed over the years, but the coffee ritual itself has long been a consistent track on the daily playlist.

When I left my last full time gig, now two and a half years ago, my morning coffee ritual became a little bit more important. I would daily start my productivity with a mug of coffee and and open keyboard, and two or three times a week I would hit up one of the four or five local cafes and settle in on some borrowed wifi and a cup of freshly brewed dark roast.

I went into the Starbucks yesterday and walked to the counter. The woman recognized me and by name offered, “Hey Brad, it’s a tall dark roast, right?”

“Uh—actually—” I replied. It was awkward for a moment but I recovered. “I’ll have a mint tea this morning.”

“Oh, of course—no problem. I’ll grab that for you right here.” I could tell I had thrown off her entire day, too—or maybe she is dealing with my coffee-less life way better than I and I am almost certainly exaggerating the effect it was having on her. Yeah, the second one.

Going coffee-less is having the desired physiological results, in case you are wondering. The health concerns that were suspected of exacerbating my symptoms have all but vanished in the last  forty or so days since I have transcended my addiction to the java. Net positive, right?

What I never really considered, tho, was the very real impact on the psychological side of removing an anchoring routine from my life. 

I woke up this morning, for example, and I was rifling through our tea collection. A couple years ago I bought a little wooden tea stand, the kind you might find in a trendy cafe, to neatly organize our tea offerings on the countertop. It started off as a delightful highlight of random houseguests who could peruse the selection. We keep in stocked from a mess of boxes stored in the cupboard below, tho, and I as I wasn’t seeing what I was looking for in the stand I went spelunking in the archives. Therein I found my hastily stashed coffee supplies—pour over cups, leftover filters, my Aeropress, bags of rapidly aging beans—stuffed in behind the tea boxes.

My morning tea tasted of a kind of regretful loss, of imperfect replacements.

Given the positive results of going coffee-less on my health I am struggling to see a reality where I would even jump back into a daily coffee ritual lifestyle again. The tradeoff is imbalanced. The cost is too much for the benefit. 

But it doesn’t mean I’m not going to mourn the loss.