One of the things I love about not travelling (too much) is that it affords more moments of quiet reflection. But before I go into this, I simply must tell you about my new coffee cup, and before that, the role that coffee plays in my day to day rituals.
There is a scene in the 2003 film ‘Bruce Almighty’ when the protagonist Bruce Nolan, recently imbued with the powers of God, sits down at his email inbox to answer the prayers of the world’s population. “Better manifest some coffee” he mutters, causing an authentic coffee grower to arrive at his window, serving him a cup from a fresh pot. “Now that’s fresh mountain-grown coffee from the hills of Columbia”. There is something of a TV trope in this scene - one I have always bought into. Need to sit down and start a task of some kind? You need a cup of coffee, Shaun.
Following this rule, I generally make myself a cup of strong, black coffee every day as my laptop cranks into life, with anticipation for what I hope will be a productive day ahead. For me, this is a ritual to be taken on slowly, and methodically. Answer an email. A sip of coffee. Join the ‘start of the week’ company-wide meeting. A sip of coffee. Review some pages from a report. Many sips of coffee. The trouble is the coffee, by now, is cold.
This is why the coffee cup in the picture at the top of this page is going to change my life. OK - I know this is a little dramatic, but honestly this is how it feels. To accompany my working time with a drink I genuinely love for its taste as well as its ritual, no longer will I need to make multiple cups of coffee, drinking them more quickly than I would like, or make one and drink it slowly, giving in to the steady decline in temperature. I can make one good sized cup, and keep it warm for hours if I like, only opening it to the elements when I need a sip.
I know that am basically admitting to having taken 52 years to discover mid-sized insulated drinking vessels. There is something more fundamental going on here though. This is perfection in design. The psychologist Donald Norman writes on the importance of function in design, as well as form. Both are important. I happen to love the form of my new cup, but it is the function that really moves me. It fits SO well with what I need. As a result, I have decided that I will take my new cup with me on all the journeys I make, as adjuncts to the legs of Beata’s circumnavigation. She starts in a day or so, and so do I. With hot coffee for hours, thank goodness.
Most of my journeys, given that I will be staying largely in my local area, will of course be walks. I have never thought to take a genericized ‘Thermos flask’ full of coffee on a walk, because I have always found such containers to be too large. This cup changes that. I can take my coffee with me on pretty much any local walk, without an oversized bag, and in the knowledge that whenever I stop to take in the view, or just for a rest, hot coffee will be available. This will help, I expect, with the thing I love about ‘not travelling’ (too much) - the many opportunities for moments of quiet reflection.
Beata writes briefly of such moments when she describes being on watch in her third blog (‘24 hours on the Atlantic…’). I have to say though that I cannot imagine such moments being the same on a boat being sailed around the world as they will be for me, in locations I know well, and in which I can focus my attention on things beyond the immediate precisely because I have learned to ignore everything else.
This ability to learn to ignore the familiar - or ‘Habituation’ - is the simplest learning mechanism. It is present in all organisms as far as we can tell, and it essentially allows us to live peaceful mental lives. It is the reason we don’t need to pay constant attention to things we have experienced before. When a new stimulus is encountered, it is attended to, but very quickly we learn to ignore the familiar, attention being drawn again only when something changes. This is why you can sit in your garden reading a book, without having to consciously attend to every car starting up, or every bird that flutters by. It’s also the reason why people learn to ignore safety warnings, something that I hope does not happen to Beata and her crewmates on their trip, as they sit and keep watch on Misty’s deck.
On a novel trip around the world, I just don’t think I would be able to find enough moments of reflection, and no amount of novelty would replace that need, for me. Conversely though, it seems like it is trickier to write about quiet reflection than it is to write about sailing around the world. I have been finding it difficult to get going, but Beata has been flying (well, sailing).
Maybe this will change when I start the first in my series of short journeys to go alongside Beata’s week-long (approx) first leg of the circumnavigation. And if it is still hard, at least I will be able to think about it a lot, due to not having to be on watch.
Shaun Helman, early January 2023.
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