Where am I?

I’m recalling a memory from high school. I’m in a familiar coffee shop near my home in Germany. I see my friend walking up the street to join me at the table. This is our usual meet up place after school.

Eiscafe Bocconcino, CityPalais, Duisburg, Germany.

We smile and head to the shop’s front to order. We order the usual — a scoop of ice cream of our favorite flavor. Or maybe we’re in a mood to explore and choose a funky flavor. In any case, we’ve never tasted the coffee from this coffee shop.

Our ice cream arrives and we head back to our table. Over ice cream, we talk about the things that confuse, wonder, and surprise us. “Where do pigeons come from?” I ask as those flocking city birds pecking furiously at the ground catch my attention. We sit in silence and our silence accepts the chattering from people drinking coffee and beer around ourselves.

Then, our conversation is filled with the thoughts that kept our minds busy: Do the pigeons live on the tops of the buildings or somewhere close to the ground? Why are there so many pigeons in the city, yet we never see where these birds are born and where they die? How do pigeons sit peacefully on top of power lines? How did they develop a sense of balance to stay on those electrical wires? We pour questions into the conversation with excitement, I’m excited, it feels like we’re onto something. But what? We’re on a quest to understand a part of our mundane world, something so trivial yet we have no answer to these questions. We are convinced they are not trivial questions.

The questions keep coming and I pull out my phone, open the Notes app, quickly typing each one my memory can recall with a gracious amount of spelling errors. I’m adding these questions to our list, the list of questions my friend and I have been collecting since we became friends.

As soon as I finish writing the last question down, my thumb instinctively scrolls down the rest of the list and suddenly, our conversation turns into a trip down memory lane. Each question is a question about the ordinary parts of our world — they might seem meaningless and even pointless to you, but they are snapshots of our boundless, childish curiosity.

I scroll down the list. How are clouds formed? When did associating cloud shapes with real-world objects start? Why do we think clouds represent objects from the human world? I remember these questions from the time my friend and I sat on the green lawn in front of the coffee shop and spent the afternoon watching the clouds, “seeing” bunnies and hats in the sky.

I continue scrolling. How are cities constructed? Who makes the decisions about the street infrastructure, the buildings that get built on top of the streets, and the shops that go into the buildings? We thought of these questions after our geography class discussed how cities are shaped by tourism on a multitude of levels like their economic industries, the city infrastructure, the distribution of natural resources, and so on.

When I’m at this German coffee shop, I am present with myself and my friend. Our conversations do not have goals. They only create a space for my imagination, my curiosity, my inner child to come to the surface and out from the curtains of my mind.

Where am I?

I’m in a coffee shop in America. I’m in college. I push open the doors to Darwin’s, a coffee shop on Massachusetts Avenue. Immediately, the cold, sharp air from the outside is zilched and all I feel is the warmth and safety of being inside the coffee shop. I’m not here to meet anyone. I’m here to work. I dislike the smell of coffee but I like to work amongst strangers. Something about their presence makes me feel accountable to stay on track and finish things I have to do. I’m willing to sacrifice the olfactory experience for a productive experience.

I take off my headphones to order my usual. A small cup of cappuccino. Sufficient to earn me a spot to work for hours in the coffee shop and to keep me awake for the tasks ahead of me.

Darwin’s coffee shop, Cambridge MA.

As soon as my order arrives, I grab it from the counter, find a table, and my headphones are hugging my ears again. The banging dishes, the shuffling of feet, and individual voices of the people around me — I have the power to mute it all once my headphones are on. My laptop and notebook consume the table, and my coffee cup is pushed to the back left edge. I start to work.

I read papers to make progress on research. I start homework assignments and debug code in order to finish milestones in the classes I’m taking. I make things happen. I turn goals into reality. But that feeling of accomplishment halts as I open a new tab to my emails. And then to my messages and texts, in the hopes of a distraction, a source of excitement, a smile, before my mind judges me for wasting time on trivial matters.

I feel hurt by my own judgment, and I look around me. I see people with their heads down, earphones in, all with a purpose. All with an endless stream of tasks like me! I sulk, but I am focused again. I’m goal-oriented. I work.

A thought. Lately, I’ve been trying to understand myself better. One model that continues to visit my thoughts is the model of a coffee shop. It all started when I asked myself: Why do I go to coffee shops? I realized that my answer depended on which version of myself I was asking. Am I asking the past or present version of myself? Naturally, I then reflected on why my answer depended on the version of myself. Have I changed? In what ways have I changed? Which changes am I proud of, or regretful of? Have these changes given me more clarity about what my values are? Have they helped me understand myself better?

I care about these questions because I care about understanding — people, communities, objects, ideas, concepts, everything. That is my way of valuing things; it’s by understanding them. For the past few months, I’ve been investing a lot of time into understanding myself. I noticed that since coming to the States for college, I sometimes get stuck in an American-coffee-shop mode of thinking: concentrate and work towards a goal. This isn’t a bad mode of thinking. I appreciate how I’ve grown into someone who can take initiative and act on the process of turning ideas into reality. But, is this mode of thinking at odds with the German-coffee-shop one — someone who can stare up to the clouds, ponder, without judgment and rather with silence?

I don’t think so. Somehow, I will figure out how to combine these two coffee shops. 🙂