Holiday 2025: This Moment

Only in the awareness of the present, can your hands feel the pleasant warmth of the cup. Only in the present, can you savor the aroma, taste the sweetness, appreciate the delicacy. If you are ruminating about the past, or worrying about the future, you will completely miss the experience of enjoying the cup of Tea. You will look down at the cup, and the tea will be gone. Life is like that.

-Thich Nhat Hanh

Every second contains twenty four moments. That is, at least by the logic of film. Watching analog film at a normal frame rate, we see twenty four images every second. Of course, we don't really see them (not in a way where we could criticize the position of an eyelash in a particular blink) but we're there for them. Though its technically two dozen still images, our brain fills in the blanks to make it seem like motion. Life is like this. In the course of our lives, memories pool around certain places and people, and our experience of them is a composite of moments. We make sense of this growing collection of moments by creating a continuity behind them. It's partly why we experience time so strangely: so many individual moments pass without our special attention. A slant of light, the way somebody laughs, the smell of a loved one's cooking. As we get older, the pattern becomes more complicated. Life seems to keep speeding up. The holidays feel like a blur.

I wish I could remember what it was like to taste tea for the first time. I think that when I share a cup with uninitiated friends (no matter the tea) their first reaction is something like "Hm. It's kinda earthy. Really subtle," and then, almost apologetically appending, "I like it." Maybe tea is subtle and I've lost my bearing in years of obsession. Suffice to say, it is delicate. But in this way tea is an excellent teacher on how to appreciate a moment. It is true that you can't taste tea while doomscrolling, or in between sips of an energy drink, or while ruminating on something you're worried about. You can only taste tea when you are present and aware in the moment. The luminous color, the dance of the leaves, the smell of the liquid. Since tea will not make itself louder, you must quiet yourself and shut out the loudness of life in the world, so that the whole world becomes the steam rising from your cup.

For many years, Spirit's slogan was "a collection of handcrafted teas, each reflecting a unique moment in space and time." It was a momentary statement about moments. As we've grown, we've rooted out and built on the words, but they bridge our purpose, present and past. Our most recent Tea Club issue is about Ritual. Not just the way ears, thoughts and eyes are enticed into the delights of the present by the intentionality of ritual, but how, when you're fully there, those things cease to matter. Ritual suggests an amazing continuity between moments. But a moment has no future and no particular past. It is just there, shining. In that way a moment is eternity, it is without end and without worry. When we enjoy moments, by ourselves or with others, our heart aches with eternity. A moment with one we love can be worth hundreds of years.

American poet Susan Howe says that for Marcel Proust, "a fragment is a morsel of time in its pure state." Proust, who penned a seven volume novel when the aroma of a madeline and a cup of tea bridged distant moments, argues an instance is so powerful because it hovers between a present that is immediate and a past that had once been present. And though the holidays invite a backwards look to "happy golden days or yore," it is essential to remember now is the only time, it is the only golden day we possess or can attend. Focus on the fragment, the burning yule of the present, not of some fictitious past. In this way, you can reconnect with your deepest self any time. All past joy is able to be felt in the present through the epiphany of a beautiful moment. 

Thich Nhat Hanh says one can only live in the moment, "When you stop worrying about what might never happen." This is a daunting prospect in our lives which are ceaselessly bombarded by worry and targeted false promises. But joy, real joy, he says, happens when we are taken out of the equation of past and future. Some years ago I was at a gallery opening (and I must not have been present in the moment because I embarrassingly don't remember the artist or the show) where the artist was playing with the notion of singular moments, and of transience. They mentioned a Japanese idiom Ichi-go, ichi-e. In my warped memory of the show, I came to understand it as two travelers passing each other in the night, they share a quick word, and move on--never to meet again. This might have been an example, but it's not the literal origin of the phrase.  I would have been floored then to learn that this famous yojijukugo stems from the tea philosophy of Sen no Rikyu. It roughly translates to "One meeting, once in a lifetime." The specific elements, in and out of our control, the people present, and the feelings shared in any given meeting will never be repeated again--even if the event itself will. Each time is unique.

A 16-year-old Emily Dickinson wrote to her friend Abiah Root "Let us strive together to part with time more reluctantly, to watch the pinions of the fleeting moment until they are dim in the distance and the new coming moment claims our attention." Whether it's mirth, connection or solitude you seek these holidays and in the coming new year, remember to slow down and smell your cup of tea, breathing in this moment. It's the only one quite like it.