Attitude

This morn­ing I was in a real funk. I was mulling over the mis­aligned val­ues I often aware I have, and was feel­ing real guilt about it. Shad­owhelm had linked a clip of Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson talk­ing to Bill Maher about “mort­gag­ing our future”:

I was won­der­ing where it had all gone wrong, and start­ing to indulge in a foul, awful, pes­simistic mood. And because frankly, I knew part of it was a bit of caf­feine with­drawal, I pulled into Seat­tle Drip to get an iced Amer­i­cano, cream but no sweet­ener (happy side note: I’m doing really well on cut­ting out the sugar!), and sat there stew­ing in my mood.

While I’m sit­ting there cussing myself for spend­ing money on cof­fee you could have made your­self, even if it is only $1.91, that’s how many min­utes of work time, is it worth that, T, is it? But you gotta have your fix, don’t ya junkie? Oh, shut up, it’s not that bad, not like your brother. Oh, I had for­got­ten that part of the equa­tion, I gotta make sure the kids don’t get into drugs and under­stand the impor­tance of a clear mind…

See? The mood was really spi­ral­ing out of con­trol, and I was latch­ing onto every lit­tle neg­a­tive thought I could. This is a bad cycle that I allow myself to get trapped in some­times, but then the enthu­si­as­tic drive thru barista dude snapped me out of my thoughts–

“Hey, look!”

“Huh?”

“Look at this, it’s so cool.” He indi­cated the pat­tern of swirly that the cream makes in the cof­fee. “Isn’t that beautiful?”

I laughed; he laughed. He shrugged, “Sorry, I just had to share it.”

Then he walked away to fin­ish the drink up and swipe my card. When he came back, he con­tin­ued, “It’s just so much fun, and the peo­ple out in the cars, they don’t see the neat things that hap­pen in here. So I try to let them see sometimes.”

I nod­ded. “I imag­ine it gets bor­ing in that lit­tle space all day, and you have to find your fun how you can.”

“You know, it’s funny, you can do some really awe­some things with foam. I’m get­ting quite tal­ented with it. But since this is a drive-thru, no one gets to see it, because I have to put a lid on it. You looked like you’d appre­ci­ate it.”

Funk bub­ble burst, just like that. A kid like that lov­ing his job, and putting his all into it, and find­ing joy and beauty, and shar­ing it with me. How can I hold on to that neg­a­tiv­ity?  Yes, those higher, more weighty top­ics, they have their place.  But so does beauty and laugh­ter and joy.   Even if the foam is friv­o­lous, it serves a purpose.