#17: Katie’s Favourite Mug
Coffee — black please, always. Big mug, the same dove grey one every morning, the size I can hold with two hands close to my chest, warming me up as I wake up. That first sip — ah.
The only way to make that first cup of coffee in the morning taste any better is when I haven’t had to make it. When my boyfriend brings me a cup of coffee in bed, so that I can spend the next hour reading without having to get up. Now that’s cosiness. That’s a moment of happiness that I gladly treasure, and there’s nothing that quite describes it, until now.
This moment, one of the simple but wonderful moments, is one that would be my kind of hygge. It’s the new ‘fad’, after mindfulness and colouring books, but it’s one that I’ve been aware of since I was very small, without even realising that it had its own specific word.
I remember when I was young and I loved to go outside and play in the snow, or to get drenched in a big rainstorm, just so that when I got home I could go in and have the relief of taking off my sopping wet clothes. I would then change into something comfy and cosy before curling up by a window to watch the storm continue, while I was inside, cosy and warm. Safe and sheltered.
This is hygge. I’ve been reading The Book of Hygge by Louisa Thomsen Brits, a book which is hygge in its own right in how wonderful it is to hold. In explaining hygge, she writes that
‘We make the mistake of believing that security is found in material things rather than people.’
Am I fooling myself, believing that there is security in this mug, my favourite, the one I use everyday? I don’t think I am. This mug, while precious to me, is my favourite because of the hygge experiences that it offers me, it is those moments of cosiness with a warming mug of coffee that I cherish.
‘Hygge helps us to enter a moment or a place. By appealing to our senses and promising security, it draws us in’.
It is the moment that is important, the physical mug provides the opportunity to experience that moment, the sense of place. Yet,
‘there is a slight anxiety implicit in hygge that heightens our experience of belonging to the moment — the knowledge that there is a world of activity and responsibility just beyond the instant, poised to impose, intertwines with our situation, enlivening us to its particulars and pleasures. The flip side of an experience of enjoyment is the certainty that it won’t last forever. Today’s moment of hygge will be tomorrow’s memory. With that awareness, we give ourselves over to the moment more completely.’
Enjoying my first mug of coffee of the day, I do not want it to end. I do not want to finish my coffee, but I also know that I cannot continually drink coffee all day, or I will be a massive shaking wreck by midday. I enjoy the moment, I do not want it to end, but it must end if I am to enjoy the moment again in the future.
What would it be like to be in a world of constant hygge? Would that be the equivalent of eternal heaven, or eternal hell? It’s the famous question of whether we need sadness to feel joy. I cannot answer that question, but I do know that I appreciate my happy, safe, and cosy moments in a more heightened way when I have escaped from a situation so opposite to that sense of shelter, and when I know that this hygge moment will not last. ‘Today’s moment of hygge will be tomorrow’s memory’. But what about tomorrow’s moment of hygge?
