Blue Sky and Warm Coffee
From the Coffee Table Book — real, handwritten gratitude from people all over the country.
Some entries in the Grateful Peoples Coffee Table Book stop you cold. A stranger sat down with a communal journal, picked up a pen, and trusted it with something enormous. This is one of those, exactly as written:
“I am grateful to be released from prison today. The beauty of seeing a blue sky outside of a cage and the warm coffee in my hand.”
There’s no way to know this person’s full story, and it isn’t ours to guess at. What’s clear is that they walked into freedom and the first things they reached for weren’t grand. A blue sky. A warm cup in the hand. The two most ordinary things in the world — and on this particular morning, the most extraordinary.
That’s the part that lingers. Most of us had a blue sky over us today too. Most of us held something warm this morning. And most of us didn’t notice either one. It often takes losing a thing — or watching someone else get it back — to see how much was sitting in plain sight the whole time.
Grateful Peoples founder Teddy Droseros has described learning this the slow way. For years he helped his mother with the simplest tasks as multiple sclerosis took them from her, and somewhere in there he realized he’d never once been grateful that he could tie his own shoes. Some mornings now, it floors him. That’s gratitude’s strange gift: it doesn’t change what’s in front of you, but it completely changes how much of it you actually see.
It doesn’t take a hard season to practice this, though a hard season will certainly teach it. You can decide, on an ordinary Tuesday, to drink the coffee like it’s the first cup — slowing down enough to meet an ordinary moment and call it what it is: a gift.
Blue sky. Warm coffee. Your one wild life, still going. Don’t wait to lose it to love it.