Better

Dear Eugene,

It's only been a month since I first started to use a hand grinder to prepare coffee, and now it feels like it's just the way how coffee drinking is meant to be.  Now if I don't need to grind my own beans to make a cup, I'd just be using coffee, instead of making it, fashioning the creation of it, and, really, enjoying it.

A program was already running when we first burst into the scene.  Bang, there we were, out of watery chaos into a strange world of order.  And it worked, a true blessing indeed, like a mother to a newborn.  We were given a place in the program without even knowing how badly we needed one.

And the program has a strange built-in feature, that it invites us to question its legitimacy.  Life is good, in many ways, even to those who have been dealt the worst hand.  But still we search, still we ask: Why can't it be better?

As if we know better.

Grinding coffee beans with my own hands, the minute before I bring to birth a nourishing, soul-infusing cup, is better.  Better what?  I don't know.  I suppose I could philosophize, but do I need to?  Better aroma, better taste, reasons good enough.  Simple hand exercise, sensual cyclical motion, the breaking of beans crickety music to my muffled morning ears, pleasures better still.  My hand going around in circles; my life going somewhere.

It's not so much that I actually know better, but better beckons me to know her true.

Yours, Alex