Life in Coffee spoons
I was stirring sugar into my coffee this morning when I noticed the spoon.
It’s just a regular teaspoon. Part of a mismatched set I’ve had since the split. But something about it caught me—how small it is, how ordinary. It made me think: this is how life passes. Not in grand, sweeping changes, but in teaspoons.
A morning routine. A cup of coffee. The sound of cereal hitting a bowl. The way my son's hair sticks up after sleep. The way the little one still says "lellow" instead of yellow. These are the things I’ll miss one day. These are the things that build a life.
But I forget that sometimes.
I worry about the future more than I want to admit. Bills, jobs, whether I’m doing enough as a father. Whether I’m falling behind. Whether all the things I dreamed about doing in my twenties are just going to be dusty tools on a shelf I never built.
Some nights I wonder: if life didn’t turn out the way you planned, does that make it a failure?
There’s something to be said for the small life. The honest one. The one where you try your best, screw up, try again. The one where the highlight of your day might just be sitting at the kitchen table, drinking lukewarm coffee while a kid tells you an endless story about a bug he saw. And you listen, because that’s what love is.
I’m not old, but I’m old enough to feel time moving differently now. I stretch more carefully before soccer. I’ve started noticing how quiet the house gets after bedtime. I laugh more softly, but also more easily.
Mortality sneaks in, not like a storm, but like a creak in the floorboard you didn’t notice until now.
But instead of fearing it, I’ve started trying to make peace with it. To see it as a reason to pay attention. A reason to stay present. Because if time is going to move, I’d rather move with it than be dragged.
So I measure my days in coffee spoons now. ---- (F you T.S. Eliot)
A good conversation. A deep breath. A bedtime story told with the lights still on. A second cup of coffee, even when I probably shouldn’t. A joke that lands just right at the end of a long day.
If that’s all life is—tiny moments, strung together—then maybe it’s not about doing more.
Maybe it’s about noticing more.
And maybe that’s enough.