Tea (or Coffee?)

I wrote this 33 years ago. I still believe it; but today I would probably say "Coffee" and hire a jazz band.

Too many people today don't understand tea. They don't understand the necessity of stopping work for tea. They think of it as a hindrance, or at best a rest to revitalize them for the task in which they are engaged.

What heresy! A rest? Tea? Never. Never can time for tea be a break to strengthen the arm for the anvil or the mind for the pen. Rather it is life, a brief contact with life, a moment passed in realizing that other people are there too. Tea is a glimpse of Paradise. That the partaker is revitalized is incidental, and to use Tea Time for physicial benefit is idiocy.

Use it for itself. Enjoy it; rejoice in it. Take it and live, but in heaven's name do not abandon it or lower it to mere sustenance.

Perhaps we would better appreciate tea if we hired an orchestra to feed our ears as our spirits grow. The idea deserves consideration.