Rituals
When I was fourteen, my grandmother made all the girls in our family get dressed up and attend a high tea. We squeezed into some random lady’s tea room in the suburbs of Illinois and wore oversized hats the shop owner provided. My grandmother oversaw the menu and frowned in disapproval when the hostess put her own spin on the classic high tea dishes. It was two hours of pouring tea from mismatched pots and talking about whether we liked our scones with or without clotted cream.
It was long, it was tedious, and it was the most incredible thing I had ever experienced.
My grandmother- along with the entire population of the United Kingdom, I suppose- knew something that I had not yet learned: the beauty of a ritual.
It was in the way we waited a set number of minutes for our tea to steep, the way each cucumber and cream cheese sandwich was carefully cut in a long, crustless strip. It was in the way my grandmother demonstrated the appropriate ratio of milk to tea. The beauty of the ritual was in all of it.
In America, convenience is a sign of success. College students burst into lecture halls a few minutes before class starts, proudly clutching a paper Starbucks cup. Employees on lunch break scarf down a salad in a plastic bowl so they can get back to work early. The faster we can do something, the better.
I stopped making tea when I started college. I visited my grandmother the summer after freshman year, and she asked if I needed more tea before I went back to school. I shrugged and told her I didn’t really make tea anymore.
I’ll never forget the disappointment that passed over her face.
“You don’t like it anymore?” she asked. For her, there would be no other reason to stop drinking tea.
“I’m in college. I don’t have time for things like that anymore.”
She sent me back with tea anyway.
For Christmas that year, I got my first teapot. It was clear, big enough for one cup, and fifteen bucks off of Amazon.
I used the electric kettle in my dinky college apartment, wiping sleep from my eyes and wondering why the hell I was wasting my time waiting for water to boil for a simple cup of tea. I measured the perfect amount of tea leaves, poured in the water, and waited 3-4 minutes. I poured in my milk, stirred in some sugar, took a sip, and smiled.
It wasn’t really about drinking a cup of tea. Just like it was for a million tea drinkers before me, it was about the ritual. Choosing the right mug, stirring it all together with a teaspoon, finding a biscuit to eat with it. There’s something about it that Starbucks can’t ever recreate.
My life became better when I stopped choosing convenience over things that brought me joy. Making a full breakfast before work, listening to music and putting on an apron while making dinner, using every beauty product in my shower every time I wash my hair. The methodical rhythm of doing something the right way instead of the fast way has brought a consistency and slowness to my life that I treasure.
My grandmother kept a framed picture of us girls standing outside the rickety tea room, each of us wearing a hat more ridiculous than the next. She liked to keep it where she could see it up until the day she died. I realize now that the menu, the outfits we wore- none of it had been for the sake of lemon curd or a picture-worthy moment. She wanted us to experience the ritual that had brought her joy since before any of us were even born.
Needless to say, I own four teapots now.
