Summer is here. For people in Tucson, that means buckle up—it’s about to get uncomfortable. On a 110-degree day, the temperature inside a parked car can exceed 157 degrees. For the first several minutes of any drive, you play a game of hot potato with the steering wheel, frantically switching hands to avoid blistering your palms. It’s in moments like these that Southwest Airlines’ famous marketing slogan cuts through the heat: “Wanna get away?” Yes. Yes, I do.
Tucsonans seeking escape from the heat can always try a weekend trip to nearby Mt. Lemmon, or head north to Flagstaff or Pinetop. For in-town options, malls offer a reprieve from the scorching temperatures. With average indoor temperatures of 70 to 72 degrees, malls are the perfect place to cool down. The best option is leaving the city altogether—taking a vacation, getting out of Dodge. For many years, Zarfa’s Luggage & Gifts in the El Con Mall was the place for travel-related items—the standbys, and the ones you didn’t even know you needed, like cup warmers.
A cup warmer is an electronic device that keeps your drink from getting cold—technology’s remedy for humanity’s inability to remain present. If you’re staying in a conventional hotel room, a microwave offers an easy escape hatch if you zone out and let your morning evaporate. But a rugged camping trip strips away those automatic safety nets. No matter the season, a dawn at camp is cold, and the first order of business is the manual ritual of the morning coffee.
When camping, I cherish my morning coffee-making routine. In the early pre-dawn moments, when you step outside the tent, you feel your hands freezing and see your breath in the air; nothing sounds better than a warm cup of coffee. I start by boiling a pot of water and grinding the coffee beans. I pour the hot water over the grinds and glory in the aroma of the coffee beans wafting from the French press. Five minutes later, the coffee is ready.
After pouring myself a cup of coffee, I’ve learned to sit and drink it right away. I don’t make a bowl of cereal. I don’t take pictures of the sunrise. Once the coffee gets cold, there’s no easy way to warm it up again in a camp setting. Electronic cup warmers were invented to eliminate exactly this type of natural consequence, but bringing an outlet-dependent gadget into the backcountry would entirely miss the point of the environment.
Over the years, I’ve learned that there is a direct correlation between my level of mindfulness on a given day and how many times I reheat my coffee: The more times I reheat my coffee, the greater the likelihood that I’m suffering from monkey mind.
Recently, I spent the day building a built-in bench for our living room. In the span of two hours, I reheated my coffee six times. It took me two hours to finish the mug, which tasted stale and dead after all the cooling and reheating. When the mind is scattered, it’s difficult to accomplish anything meaningful. When it comes to lukewarm coffee, cup warmers address the symptom, not the underlying cause. The problem isn’t your beverage getting cold; it’s being too distracted to enjoy it while it’s hot.
In Chado, or The Way of Tea, every aspect of a Japanese tea ceremony is done mindfully. The stones in the walkway leading to the teahouse entrance are arranged so that guests must focus on where they place their feet. This quiets the mind before the ceremony. The teahouse entrance is purposely built low, forcing guests to bow before entering—a reminder to be humble. The style of cups and the hanging scroll are carefully selected to elicit a particular theme for that day’s ceremony. The combined effect of these elements is that participants drop distractions and focus on the present moment.
The great Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyu once said, “When you hear the water splash into the tea bowl, the dust in your mind is washed away.” An overactive mind is like a dust devil in the desert—it swoops down like a mini-tornado and sends dust flying everywhere. By engaging with the present moment, the dust in your mind settles, and you can see clearly again. The lesson of the cup warmer is mindfulness. Whether you stay in town for the summer or take a vacation, make it a point to enjoy your morning cup of coffee in one sitting. Banish the monkey mind and enjoy the present moment.