Off My Coffee

I plucked a Styrofoam cup from the top of the stack, squeezed down the lever of the coffee urn, and watched the stream of coffee fill my cup. So perfectly contained. The cafeteria was nearly empty at 8:00 a.m. All the poor souls with early classes had already munched their cereal, gulped their coffee, and hurried to class; the next wave of breakfast-eaters had not yet arrived. I know this time—the quiet that falls between the hastily-abandoned chairs—a time that allows for a table alone, a Bible, and mug of coffee.

Setting my coffee on the counter beside the urn, I reached for a packet of sugar. I paused, hand in mid-mechanical reach: no sugar packets left. I exhaled and watched my cozy breakfast vision evaporate. Oh, dilemmas. Now I could either send my un-drunk coffee down the conveyer belt—what a waste! Or I could grit my teeth and withstand a packet of artificial sweetener. Fake sugar won the contest, but it could not resurrect my idea of the perfect start to a morning.

I sympathize with the Cheshire Cat in Tim Burton’s version of Alice in Wonderland. In a scene about a third of the way through the film, the Mad Hatter and other characters discuss the overthrow of the Bloody Red Queen, the villain of the movie.

“Come, come,” says the Hatter, “we simply must commence with the slaying and such.”

The Cheshire Cat looks mournfully into his cup of tea and comments, “All this talk of blood and slaying has put me off my tea.”

The Hatter stiffens. “The entire world is falling into ruin and poor Chess is off his tea.”

The Hatter would not approve of me. I was eleven on September 11, 2001. I knew that Americans hundreds of miles away had died, but to my everlasting embarrassment it was not the national tragedy that I felt most acutely. What put me out of sorts that day was that my mother, out of reverence for the dead, would not allow me to have a friend over to play. As a child in South Carolina, the denial of fun was more jarring than death many states away.

Whether the unexpected event happens to be a national tragedy or absent sugar packets, my hopes are easily squashed. I’m put off—off my tea, off my coffee. It’s always been this way for me. My fantasies turn life into a long, thin line of continuity, never a knot or gnarl in the rope that links experiences. Pretending omniscience, I expect life to come gently, according to plan.

People like me prompted James, the brother of Jesus to write in his epistle, “Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow” (4:13-14, NIV). I don’t even know that in five minutes there will be no sugar.

Somehow we find security in thinking we have our lives drawn in clear lines across a two dimensional paper, the future delineated by our fingertips. We talk of national security, homeland security, social security. On the front page of the Social Security Administration’s 2012 budget overview, this motto sits affixed: “Fulfilling Our Commitments to the American People.” We refuse to admit that our expectations may go unmet—that social security might fumble, that our country’s security might be breached, that our intelligence agencies might fail.

We pad ourselves against the unexpected. As I wrote this, I listened to a commercial for flood insurance. The canned radio voice told the audience to fear losing “the lamp you just had to have” to a flood. Buy insurance. The day before I wrote this, a woman from my church went to court against an uninsured driver who collided with and killed her husband. Buy insurance. Congress passed a law that lets me stay on my parents’ insurance for another three years. Insurance. Like the passengers aboard the Titanic, we have such expectations of safety.

Expectations can result in disappointment. According to one member of my family, the best way to prepare for disappointment is to expect the worst in life. I cannot embrace this philosophy; denying my hopes makes them no less real. Disappointment and frustration are the proofs that we hoped for something and were thwarted—whether we admit our hopes or not.

Disappointment cannot exist without expectations, yet humans cannot live without expectations. To live without expectations would be to eschew any thought beyond the moment, which is simply impossible. Not even children manage this. Infants cry because they expect care. Children throw tantrums when they hoped for more time to play.

Adults have even higher hopes. The framers of the Constitution said we possess the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In other words, our founding fathers expected certain things in life, and they fought a war to win back those rights. More recently, the United States went to war in Afghanistan in an attempt to reclaim its shattered security. We thought we lived in safety until the 9/11 terrorist attacks demolished this cozy mindset.

The entire world is falling into ruin, and I am off my coffee.

I was eighteen, celebrating my high school graduation. Friends had filled our little brick house and trickled out onto the porch, nibbling cream puffs and bite-sized cheesecakes. After the guests left and the party food was stowed away, wedged into a bursting refrigerator, a few of my closest friends stayed to watch a movie. In the middle of the movie, my best friend received a call from her parents. Her neighbor, another teenager, had just committed suicide. My little knot of friends shifted into silence. We blinked at the paused DVD. Should we keep entertaining ourselves in the midst of tragedy? I was no longer eleven years old, so this time I was fully aware of the selfishness burgeoning from disappointment. Why did this have to happen during my graduation party?

Sometimes disappointment descends quickly with a telephone call or a news report. Other times our vanishing hopes stalk us, whispering of a future uncomfortably unlike the one we fantasized. My college graduation looms in the foggy distance, and I stand on the brink of the mystic “rest of my life.” I step to the edge of the unknown, look over the ledge, and say, “This was not what I had in mind.” In my mind, life had destinations, but no map to lead me there. I pictured myself running a bed and breakfast somewhere in Kentucky surrounded by white picket fences. I had a husband and a family, yet magically plenty of time to write. There was no plan B.

The generation graduating high school and college with me faces the confusion and the choices of unrealized hopes. The job market presents uncomfortable figures, with unemployment in the US at 9.1%, according to the Bureau of Labor. Simultaneously, we face a myriad of career fields, each with nebulous, overlapping qualifications. We wonder where to start; we feel like misguided rockets, sent into space with no coordinates. Somehow we get the impression we are required to succeed, required to live in a subdivision with green lawns neatly separating our lives from the neighbors’, with 2.5 children, and be happy. Do you hear? Be happy!

We are a culture of tired optimism, screaming happiness to hide the disillusion of disappointed expectations. Spread your wings. Aim for the stars (you might hit the moon!). You can be anything you want to be.

James offers different counsel. “What is your life?” he bluntly asks. “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes” (James 4:14, NIV)

It is uncomfortable to picture ourselves as a morning fog. Faced with our limitations, inaction is tempting. But indecision is no salvation from disappointment. In T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the speaker’s fear paralyzes him. He spends the entire poem imagining what he might have done in life, what he might have said to his love interest. His fear of rejection and disappointment keeps him from action. “Would it have been worth while /,” he ruminates, “If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, / And turning toward the window should say: / ‘That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all.’”

The man in the poem never gathers the courage to speak his mind to the woman because he can’t face the possibility of dashing his hopes in an unhappy ending. He delays the moment of unmet expectations: “…there will be time / And time for yet a hundred indecisions.” Yet his indecision and inaction fail to save him from disappointment in the end. Near the conclusion of the poem, he laments, “I grow old…I grow old.”

But perhaps hope actually materializes when we recognize that we are a vanishing mist. If we are not as lofty as we believe, then maybe our tea and coffee are less significant than we think. I watch a world of vanishing childhood sureties. There is no job slipping into place without effort like a car reaching its destination without driving. There’s no husband or white picket fence, no bed and breakfast.

“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,” says the narrator of “Prufrock.” My impulse is to do the same. Plan each inch of the future. Demand my life in even doses of happiness. But I believe in a God who measures the heavens with His hands; He is too big for my little spoons.

The disintegration of my expectations is just what I need to blow my coffee off its saucer; and maybe there is relief in watching my dreams soak into the carpet. When my assumptions diminish to a dark smudge on the recesses of my brain, I begin to hope for other things, unexpected things.

I return to James and imagine a slight “I told you so” in his voice. But he then advises, “You ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that’” (James 4:14-15, NIV). I hear it as an invitation to dangle my dreams by a string, willing to watch Someone wiser cut the string while I wait patiently for something new. There is a thrill in the unknown future when I ease my grip on my expectations.

When our dreams fail us, when our security collapses, when the spoons we’ve measured our lives with turn out to be too small, we can still enjoy the unexpected as it comes. I will cross my legs, pinkie held delicately away from the cup, anticipating an unexpected intrusion. I will revel in the mystery of the unexpected. Why, I do not even know what will happen tomorrow.

I won’t bother to measure out my life.

He holds the coffee.

We will live and do this or that.

First published in 2012 in The Ivy Leaves Journal of Literature and Art, vol. 86, p. 64-67.