3 Life Lessons from the Ancient Art of Drinking Tea
“There is something in the nature of tea that leads us into a world of quiet contemplation of life.” ― Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
Everyone has their favorite thing. Mine is a cup of tea.
Sometimes, everyday ordinary things can teach us more about life than a pile of wisdom books.
The Chinese word, chayi, meaning “the art of drinking tea” or simply ch’a meaning “tea” encapsulates a history of deep personal and political implications — beauty, aesthetic, Zen ethics, ritual, and community.
The legend has it that some 1500 years ago, Bodhidharma, the Zen Buddhist priest, who traveled from India to China, was meditating in his cave when he began to fall asleep. In an attempt to keep himself awake, he ripped off his eyelids, which fell to the ground and became tea plants…
The “meme” of tea has come a long way since then — from a silly legend to the personal and social habit of billions of people with hundreds of tea varieties and tea cultures around the world.
“A cup of tea would restore my normality” wrote Douglas Adam in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 1979 in which he referred to tea as a habit, a normalcy in row of our modern attitudes.
But centuries ago, Lu Yu wrote a beatiful ode on tea titled The Classic of Tea, in which he symbolized tea with harmony and chaos of the universe, a perfect Tao that requires mastery of skill, patience, flow-like focus, engagement of all senses, and appreciation of small things…
“Tea … is a religion of the art of life,” wrote Kakuzō Okakura in The Book of Tea. There is indeed a lot to learn from the ancient art of ch’a.
Pausing and Slowing Down
We live in a world where everything is at our fingertips. Don’t want to cook? Order. Don’t want to talk and flirt with people in real life? Swipe life. Just bored? There is an unlimited supply of entertainment. This kind of life where we don’t have to wait too long to get good things leaves little room for patience.
But “good things come to those who wait” may not simply be a proverb popularized by Heinz ad. It is an actual super truth of life which is demonstrated by the art of making and drinking tea.
One of the dialogues of cyberpunk Japanese anime, Ergo Proxy involve the preparation of tea which goes as follows, “Take this tea, for example, the more you brew it, the better it becomes.”
You don’t need a tea connoisseur to know that good tea takes a good amount of time — not just to prepare but to drink as well. There is a local belief that it’s a sin to drink tea in a hurry. You don’t just ‘drink’ tea, you sip and savor it. You pause, you slow down.
You take your time…
This principle applies to many things — having sex, finding love, reading books, enjoying conversations, appreciating art, learning a craft…
You don’t enjoy something if you don’t fully immerse yourself into it. In his book, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that being “in flow” means you are fully engrossed in the things you do, you don’t rush through them by taking them as a chore or a task, but a natural part of life.
Staying in the moment
Have you ever been in a situation where you play your favorite music or song but since you were not paying attention, you forgot to enjoy it?
Well, that’s just one example. Most of us go through life, through most things without paying attention kinda in a zombie-auto pilot mode. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, it is by being present, staying in the moment, and paying attention that we become aware of the beauty of life around us.
For instance, drinking tea is one thing, but enjoying it requires you to be in the moment — it requires you to taste, feel, touch, see and smell. It requires you in the Here and Now.
“It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.”―Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Here and Now is a powerful Japanese concept which can be developed as follows:
The first step is to develop the habit of doing whatever needs to be done with concentrated attention, with skill rather than inertia. Even the most routine tasks, like washing dishes, dressing, or mowing the lawn become more rewarding if we approach them with the care it would take to make a work of art — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Appreciating small things
The small details of life often hide a great significance — Margaret Atwood
A personal confession: You know I often wonder how life would have been like if I was born in a small African village, or a slum in Mumbai, or in North Korea, or let’s say in Hitler’s Germany. What would happen if tomorrow my life changed all of a sudden, bad things happened. The loss of loved ones, or an illness, or a natural disaster…
Most things are temporary. They can change at any time. But somethings are permanent. And they remain the same — and they are small minuscule everyday things that we take for granted.
The personal diary of Victor Klemperer, a literary scholar of Jewish origins, who lived through the Nazi regime of the 1930s documents this perfectly. His diary did not talk about big things, big words and big ideas but small monotonous details of everyday life, things that kept his sanity.
In Eat Pray Love, when the author Elizabeth Gilbert is about to have a mental breakdown, she asks herself to just “go to sleep.”
When life turns sour, the only things that keep us afloat are the little stuff, eating, sleeping, bathing, small talking, laughing…
That is our only hope.
We don’t know what the future looks like. There are certainly many things wrong with the world. Our economy can collapse. People can stop believing in democracy. Fascism can come around as it is doing in many parts of the world. Climate change. A.I and surveillance. The list is endless…
It is only the comfort of small things, our routines and rituals that provide a sense of order and permanence…
“I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.”―Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground
