The Joy of Doing Things Slowly

From Kiersten Lease💌

When I was fourteen, my grandmother had all the girls in our family get dressed up and attend a high tea. We squeezed into some random lady’s tea room in the suburbs of Illinois and tried on oversized hats the shop had displayed on a faded brown coat hook. My grandmother oversaw the menu and frowned in disapproval when the hostess put her own spin on the classic high tea dishes. Chicken salad should not contain mustard, she announced to her three granddaughters. It was two hours of pouring tea from mismatched pots and talking about whether we liked our scones with or without clotted cream, and giggling over delicately iced petit fours.

It was long, it was tedious, and it was the most incredible thing I had ever experienced.

My grandmother– along with the entire population of the United Kingdom, I suppose– knew something that I had not yet learned: the beauty of a ritual.

It was in the way we waited a set number of minutes for our tea to steep, the way each cucumber and cream cheese sandwich was cut in a long, crustless strip. It was in the way my grandmother demonstrated the appropriate ratio of milk to tea. The beauty of the ritual was in all of it.

In America, convenience is a sign of success. College students burst into lecture halls a few minutes before class starts, proudly clutching a paper Starbucks cup with a lipstick stain on the lid. Employees on their lunch break scarf down a grocery store salad in a plastic bowl so they can get back to work early. Car shops advertise a five-minute oil change on every street corner. The faster we can do something, the better.

There are some days that I feel like I hardly take a breath. My phone vibrates nearly a hundred times an hour, my work email stacks up with no time to tackle it, and the news is pouring an endless stream of cynicism and doom on top of it all. Maybe it comes with growing older, maybe it’s simply a sign of the times, but we are all in a constant rush. Rush hour traffic is simply…traffic. There is no time to waste on a few extra syllables.

I stopped making tea when I started college. I visited my grandmother the summer after freshman year, and she asked if I needed more tea before I went back to school. I shrugged and told her I didn’t really make tea anymore.

I’ll never forget the disappointment that passed over her face.

“You don’t like it anymore?” she asked. For her, there would be no other reason to stop drinking tea.

“I have class at 8am. I don’t really have time for things like that anymore.”

She sent me back with tea anyway.

For Christmas that year, I got my first teapot. It was clear, big enough for one cup, and fifteen bucks off of Amazon.

I used the electric kettle in my dinky college apartment, wiping sleep from my eyes and wondering why the hell I was wasting my time waiting for water to boil for a simple cup of tea. I measured the perfect amount of tea leaves, poured in the water, and waited 4-5 minutes, remembering what my grandmother taught me in that tea room all those years before. I poured in my milk, stirred in some sugar, took a sip, and something clicked.

It wasn’t really about drinking a cup of tea. Just like it was for a million tea drinkers before me, it was about the ritual. Choosing the right mug, stirring it all together with a teaspoon, finding a biscuit to eat with it. There’s something about it that Starbucks can’t ever recreate.

My life became better when I stopped choosing convenience over things that brought me joy.

Making a full breakfast before work, listening to music and putting on an apron while making dinner, using every beauty product in my shower every time I wash my hair. The methodical rhythm of doing something the right way instead of the fast way has brought a consistency and slowness to my life that I treasure.

I’m still in a rush for 90% of my day. Tapping my fingers listlessly on the steering wheel while waiting for the light to turn green, flipping my eggs a few seconds too soon in order to get to work on time, and sure, I’ve been known to stop for a five-minute oil change.

But even still, there is that other 10%. Those parts of my day that I refuse to compromise on. Moments where I get to lean in, take a breath, and do something right. Those 4-5 minutes of waiting for my tea to steep are some of my favorite moments of the day. Not just because there is a cup of hot tea on the other side of them, but because there’s simply nothing else to do but wait.

My grandmother kept a framed picture of us girls standing outside the rickety tea room, each of us wearing a hat more ridiculous than the next. She liked to keep it where she could see it up until the day she died. I realize now that the menu, the outfits we wore, the hats– none of it had been for the sake of trying lemon curd or a picture-worthy moment. She wanted us to experience the ritual that had brought her joy since before any of us were even born.

Needless to say, I own four teapots now.

About the Author:

Kiersten Lease is a twenty-something writer with a talent for overthinking, procrastinating, and turning life’s messiest moments into stories worth sharing. Her work blends humor, honesty, and vulnerability, embracing the beauty of oversharing with strangers and finding meaning in the everyday. When she’s not writing, Kiersten is likely celebrating Christmas in July, booking her next trip, or figuring out how to earn just a few more airline miles.

Substack ID: Kiersten Lease

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