Unquiet Desperation

I’ve been roasting coffee on my stovetop at home. I enjoy it. There’s something about the smell of the green coffee beans slowly turning a deep, dark brown, something about the cracking in the pan as the water expands to burst the outer husk of the bean that makes me smile. The true payoff comes about twenty-four hours after the roasting, opening up the sealed container and taking a whiff of the freshest coffee I’ve had in a while. It’s a ritual I’ve come to enjoy, and one that I encourage others to try.

I’ve had people tell me about using air poppers and other more expensive devices to make “the perfect roast.”  I’m grateful for the advice, but I’m not doing this for perfection. I’m doing it because I wanted to cultivate a non-digital skill, and because the act of the work itself makes me happy.

A few weeks ago, my family and I visited Roscoe Village in Coshocton, Ohio. Roscoe Village is a combination town center and historical reenactment village, where you can learn how people originally lived when settling, attend an old-style school lesson in the original school house, learn about period medical practices, etc. It might be the fact that I enjoy studying history, or it might be that I went on one too many medievalist camp-outs in my youth, but I’m always drawn to the craftsmen doing their work by hand. The term “honest work” comes to mind, as does the realization that I might be able to do similar work, if only I spent the time to learn.  When I was younger, I enjoyed woodworking, though I never pursued it. I enjoyed music, but did not pursue it. I enjoyed brewing, and did not…you see the pattern here. Everyday life will overwhelm you if you let it, and for the past fifteen years, I’ve been building a career in software development, which makes all manner of odd demands on one’s time. There are all kinds of excuses for not pursuing our interests, and all seem equally valid at the time.

As we walked around the village, I began to think about this I.O.U. I’d written to myself.  I’ve spent the better part of fifteen years staring at a computer screen.  The aversion to it started about three years ago, but I worked hard to bury that feeling when I started at Mahalo, where my screen time on a weekly basis would shoot through the roof. For years I’ve been craving time away from the screen, and this reminder was just what I needed to get the ball rolling.

It must seem strange to many of you that I would need a reason to shut the computer off. Understand that I’ve been enamored with computers since I was 15, and this was my hobby long before it was my career.  Converting that hobby into a career was at once a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because I was doing something that interested me, but a curse because I did not cultivate other interests outside of the glow of a computer monitor.  When I started to resent the time I spent online outside of the office, it caused a real problem.

While walking down the streets of Roscoe Village, I had time to reflect on this.  I had other interests, but I tossed them aside for writing code, both on work time and off.  I got involved with communities of people online, spent time in virtual space with them, but back in realspace my relationships and interests were lacking.

We were standing in the basement kitchen of one of the houses, listening to a woman speak about how they would cook in the old days. She was in front of a stone fireplace, showing the tools of the trade, offering some freshly-baked bread and churned butter to taste. Then she pointed at an odd looking tool: it looks like a coffee can on a long rod with a little door cut into the side. She said that this was a coffee roaster, and people used to roast their own coffee over the fire each morning, then store it for a few days, grinding it as they needed it.

It was like a warm sun ignited in my chest. There was a sense of realization that here was something that interested me, something that I could do, hands on, for the sheer joy of doing it.  The next morning, I drove down to the local grocery, picked up a pound of green Colombian beans, and started to roast my own coffee.

I discovered that the joy I feel while working out a problem in code is the same joy I feel when working on a new roast. The realization that I was, as a good friend puts it, hacking my world was like a TNT for my brain. The experimentation and process of roasting coffee, or cooking, or brewing ignites the same fire in my mind that working through a code problem does: it’s all hacking, and it feels great.

The best part is that I can more readily share to fruits of my labor with my friends and family. The biggest drawback to my career is that if I do my job well, no one can see the craft, the reasons for things working the way they do, the very things that makes the work itself beautiful. It’s hard for people to gain an appreciation for well-crafted code, but a good cup of coffee goes a long way. They can savor and appreciate it, they can revel in the aesthetic that I felt when I was roasting it.

This has been a revelation to me. It pleases me to no end. It makes me happy.

I’m planning to go beyond roasting coffee, getting back into brewing beers and making liquors. It’s not for a business, it’s not for money, it’s for the sheer joy of doing something with my hands that both makes me feel happy and fulfilled, and that I can share with others.

To conclude: roasting coffee became a symbol to me, a process toward finding enjoyment outside of the laptop screen. It’s why I’ve been talking about it so much both in realspace and on Twitter, with my friends out there. Like all worthwhile things, it is bigger than the words I use to describe it, because the meaning is greater than the meager descriptions I can hobble together. It is joy, and joy is a rare thing in life. We need to embrace it, however we find it, whenever we are lucky enough to do so.

Tags: coffee, craft, joy

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 6th, 2009 at 10:34 am and is filed under Cooking & Baking, Essays, Food & Drink, My Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.