The Far East of course has made an art form of preparing, making and serving tea and other drinks. And the exquisite apparatus they use in presentation puts the cheap cups they sell us in our supermarkets here in the UK to shame.
I recall my mother saying her father always came in and asked for a hot cup of tea (he drank it very strong) and in Charlie Chaplin’s memoir about his mother who was taken to a mental asylum, recalling her words ‘I would been alright if I had had a hot cup of tea.’ A traumatic thing to tell your young son in the circumstances.
But then circumstances are all important when it comes to how things effect us. Indeed they describe to our minds how important most things are. It is not just the experiences of life that play out in our lives but where we are mentally when they are experienced, what we have set as our goals, what we have accepted as our world view and even who we are with –
This interplay of circumstances some of which we can control and some of which we cannot determines how we take experiences. They set the level of our elation, the number of our tears, the intensity of our anger. And very often they can present us with the exquisite mental ability to cope or deprive us of that ability all together.
Not everything is in the hands of fate, and lot of things are simply down to who we are.