This past week my wife and I decided to take a day trip to a well-known shopping centre. A few hours into our jaunt, parched from all the shopping and sightseeing, I wanted a refreshing beverage so we went to one of the many cafes in the mall. The first thing I noticed as we arrived at the cafe entrance was just how busy it was – there was a line of customers waiting to be served which stretched from the till to the door – but this was where we wanted to get our drinks, so there was no choice but to join the queue. The line moved along, we got to the till and placed our orders, and a few minutes later, we were walking out of the store with large paper cups full of scalding hot drinks.
Before I go further, I should mention that I’m particular about my hot drinks. I know what I like and how I like it. I could devote an entire blog post to my beverage preferences and the thought process underlying my choices, but I’ll spare you the tedious details. Suffice it to say I have certain expectations when I go out for hot drinks, and the moment the first sip of my drink hit my taste buds in the mall, those expectations weren’t met. For what it’s worth, the drink wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t even bad, it just wasn’t as good as I knew it could be and hoped it would be.
So there I was, tolerating a so-so beverage, contemplating whether to throw it in the bin and go in search of another, but for reasons that weren’t immediately clear to me at that moment, I stuck with it. Perhaps I was too thirsty to stop drinking it or couldn’t bring myself to waste it, perhaps I was too tired to do the leg work needed to find another cafe, perhaps I was too impatient or lazy to face the prospect of another long queue. Whatever it was, it had me glued to a communal bench in the mall, drinking what was a pretty average drink. Until it wasn’t. About two-thirds of the way down the cup, I noticed that the drink tasted better, it had turned from a so-so drink to a pretty nice one. But what had changed? This was the prevalent question on my mind. Keep in mind that this was a tall paper cup with a lid, so the whole time, I couldn’t see the contents of the cup, which meant I didn’t have the benefit of visual cues to help me answer the question. I had only my taste buds to fall back on. Something was different now, and with each sip, I paid close attention to how my tastebuds reacted to the blend of substances and compounds swirling around in my mouth, the key word being “blend”.
I know I promised to spare you a spiel about my beverage preferences, but I have to say – because this is relevant – that the drink I had in my hand was a single-shot decaf oat milk mocha, which is one of my go-to hot drinks. I can expand on every aspect of this drink order (and this isn’t even the full thing I tell the baristas), but again, I’ll spare you the details because the extended version isn’t relevant to this post. What is relevant is, as I said, the drink didn’t taste like a mocha at first, but only after drinking more than half of the cup’s contents did it start to taste like something I’d recognise as a mocha, and I believe I’ve figured out why this happened.
A single-shot decaf oat milk mocha isn’t the most straightforward drink to make. I’d wager a guess that it’s not an order baristas get regularly. On the surface, the order should be simple enough to execute during a typical shift, but as I said, the cafe was pretty busy and the baristas couldn’t have been having the easiest time taking orders and making drinks. I could easily see how a stressed barista could have assembled the elements – the coffee shot, the milk, the cocoa powder – required to fulfil my order, but not stirred them all in properly, causing certain elements (like the dense cocoa powder) to settle at the bottom of the cup, resulting in a hot drink that tastes like a weak latte at first and a nice chocolatey mocha later on. This is what I believe happened with my drink, and it left me with a thought that’s stayed with me long enough to want to write a blog post about it.
I consider my experience with that drink an apt metaphor for our creative ventures, careers, and life in general. When we start out on a new path, say learning to write songs or stories, we’re met with initial output that presents as lukewarm, so-so, perhaps even mediocre, just like the first few sips of my hot drink. We might be tempted to phone it in or abandon it altogether, but if we do so, if we fail to persevere through the uneventful bits, we may never get to enjoy the tasty goodness at the bottom of the cup. In an ideal world, we would always get our drinks properly made and rigorously stirred so that they always taste great from the onset and each sip tastes just as good as the next, but we don’t always get dealt the best hand. What’s more, just like I couldn’t see into the cup and thus had no visual cues to fall back on, in life we seldom have the benefit of foresight to tell us if and when things will get better down the line. It behoves us to stick with the process and exercise the patience and discipline required to persevere through the mediocre bits and make it to the more interesting parts. And if our creative journey is akin to the cup with the bad-now-better-later drink, we can seek solace in the fact that while today’s sip isn’t as delicious as it could be, the best is yet to come.
P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.