Melissa Stephens Art

Have you ever wandered into a coffee shop, placed your order and then, while the barista was brewing your beverage, looked around? Not a quick, cursory glance before your attention turns to your phone to solve the mystery of today’s Wordle; I mean an unhurried, inquisitive look around the café. I have, and I’ve noticed the most interesting looking people, especially those who are sitting alone, coffee cup nearby, writing in a notebook or typing on a laptop, totally in flow, lost in their thoughts. What are they working on, I’d wonder? Homework? A job application? Their great American novel? I realized, as I gazed at all those people who had allowed themselves time to linger, I was envious, I wished I could also sit at a table and get lost in my own words. Why not I thought, I like coffee! I have a gazillion notebooks and pens and a laptop! I like to write! Why had I never given myself permission for this seemingly simple pleasure? Why was I always the “to go” order who got my coffee in a paper cup and drank it while driving to my next destination? Why couldn’t I be the “for here” person whose coffee was delivered to my table in a ceramic mug while I sat down, pulled my laptop from my backpack, and LINGERED, crafting sentences and paragraphs of my own making. After years and years of feeling jealous, I was struck by the obvious, indeed I can! I saw this quote, author unknown, years ago and often need to remind myself of its truth: “Everything changed the moment she realized she had the time to do everything that was most important in her life.” I had the time; I just hadn’t yet discerned what was most “important” in my life.

I know no one else is counting, but this is blog post #13 for me! That means once per month, for an entire year, I’ve kept the promise I made to myself to share longer form writing. And you know what, almost every one of those posts was started or edited or both while sitting and lingering in a coffee shop.  I made coffee shop writing one of my intentions this past year and, at the beginning of every month, I jot an appointment on my calendar to find a new café, where I commit to an hour or more of sipping and typing. Thus far, I’ve managed to avoid the cookie-cutter, franchised purveyors of caffeine. Instead, I’ve visited all the artsy, quirky, quaint little coffee shops in and around my small, college town that Google can find for me.

One wouldn’t think I’d need to make an appointment for myself in retirement, don’t I have more time that I know what to do with? You’d be surprised! It’s easy for me to get distractedly lost when a day or a week stretches in front of me with endless possibilities. I find making an appointment with myself guarantees I prioritize my “important,” otherwise I will likely never get around to it. If writing or painting or steeping myself in one of the myriad of topics I’d love to learn on a deeper level is important to me, and it is, then I need to set aside the time for it. When I make that appointment, I make a commitment, a promise to myself. When I write it in ink on my calendar, I’m also writing myself a permission slip — to leave my house and my to-do lists behind for 1 or 2 hours and go be that person I used to envy.

I could end this post here, pat myself on the back and hit publish but, I believe, if I dig a bit deeper into my newly curated coffee shop habit, I’ll uncover the nugget of wisdom I’d like to remember and share. You see, it’s not really about the cuppa joe, or the laptop, or the lingering, or even the writing. It’s about noticing all the times I repeatedly say to myself, “I wish I could ….” and then don’t. I wish I could sit in a coffee shop and write. I wish I could learn to paint. I wish I could find friends who love to make art. I wish. I wish. I wish!  We all wish we could be something or do something, learn something or have something but, for whatever reason, the story we tell ourselves is that we can’t. Why not? Why not, as one of our sons once famously said, “make an effort not an excuse.” Those longings, those repeatedly whispered wishes of our hearts, they are our guides, our teachers, if, and only if, we pay attention and listen to them. However, we can’t let our story end in simply noticing our wishes. If we truly seek to grow, to metamorphose, we need to act on those wishes. We need to honor our “important” by DO-ing it, by making an appointment on our calendars, by signing a permission slip for ourselves, by writing in a coffee shop, or playing on the guitar for an hour a week, or drawing the glorious hummingbird who visited your feeder all summer. Wishing is gauzy and ethereal. Doing is gutsy and brave. Doing is a verb! Doing is trying and failing and trying again. Doing is transformational.

Canadian novelist and poet, Margaret Atwood wrote, “In the end, we’ll all become stories.” When we listen to our whispered wishes, when declare our important, and when we do the things we most want to do, that’s when our stories, and our lives, become beautiful and interesting, unique and compelling. That’s the kind of story I’m trying to write.