Espresso Over Brew Coffee

Less is more. It’s true in both flavour and experience.

Consider the first sip of espresso. Think about how the smooth nectar coats the entirety of the tongue. Notes of acidity and floral accents send bursts of shock from the taste buds to the brain and a tingle past the neck and shoulders.

The seismic wave of flavour doesn’t end there. We merely fail to realize how far the waves roll because we’ve dulled our sensitivities to it.

Think about the gaps in time between each sip. Three or four sips and the espresso is done.

It becomes a ritual. Sip, rest, cleanse with sparkling water, rest, then sip again.

It’s not the kind of companion that can be abused. It’s not a filler to bouts of distraction or a tool for mindless consumption.

Each sip is intentional. The mind is prepared for the taste. It craved the flavour and braced itself to savour the moment for as many seconds as possible.

Each sip has an intensity that can’t be replicated with mere quantity. The intensity elongates time and extends the short experience from seconds to minutes. It creates the kind of awe we experience when we enter a panoramic room covered in Monet or a night-lit canal in Jordaan, Amsterdam.

I’m referring to what espressos do that large-sized brewed coffees don’t. But this applies to all activities.

It’s exactly how I feel squatting 450lbs for 1 repetition over jogging for 10km. It’s the total immersion of a 2-hour movie that took four years to make versus eight hours of 30-second clips. It’s the week spent diving into a captivating piece of literature over a year reading unending streams of 140 characters.

The more it’s done by others, the less it’s worth doing for me. Keeping up with what is easy to do is a losing proposition. The sheer abundance makes that easy to forget.

It’s the scarcity in each micro-step that makes it matter. Each sip, each rep, each book, each movie, and each opportunity.

Each action has to be intentional because of the scarcity. It’s the short bursts of such intense experiences that’ll sustain the years of striving afterward. We mustn’t stop.