Unpopular opinion: I don’t like warm drinks — whether that’s tea, coffee or the like. They never feel soothing, and if I have a sore throat, I would prefer to down a glass of ice water, letting the coldness spread throughout me and numb the pain. When I came to Hopkins, that didn’t change about me. However, I value the comfort that arises from sipping a cup of tea; it provides a chance to relax, pause and reflect — time that I would rarely carve out for myself. For the longest time, I felt guilty for slowing down; I believed that I should constantly strive to make the best use of my time and to do something.
As I progressed throughout my freshman year of college, it felt that time was both speeding up — moving too fast — and dragging on simultaneously. While I rummaged through my drawers in May, finding blue jay tote bags, pocket notebooks and other merchandise I received during orientation week, I remember thinking how it felt I started college yesterday. I went down the rabbit hole of thinking, “Well, could I have done more with my time?”
One day over the summer, in the midst of doing my best to continue learning and filling in the time that homework assignments ate up during the school year, I paused to think: What did it mean to “do more”? Was it writing more blog posts? Reading more articles? Joining more student organizations on campus? Even if I had done more, it wouldn’t have been enough; a lingering voice would still be at the back of my head, whispering, “There’s always more you could do, right?”
Yet, as I pondered freshman year, the memories that tug at the corners of my mind were the seemingly mundane ones — not the “big achievements.” For example, there was one Friday afternoon in March where I told myself that I would enable noise cancellation on my headphones and plow through my linear algebra homework. Instead, I ended up running into a friend at Brody Learning Commons, and we spent the afternoon talking about nothing and everything (though some studying got done).
Even while at Hopkins over the summer, little moments like that spontaneous dinner plan I made after the fire alarm went off in my apartment have added excitement to my life. Being productive brings a fleeting sense of accomplishment, but doing something all the time isn’t sustainable and doesn’t lead to contentment in the long term. Rather, I realized that I needed to give myself something that helped me remember that I was doing my best each day and to cherish the moments that made life meaningful.
On the first day of August, I opened up the Notes app on my phone, created a new document and pinned it to the top of my unruly list of documents that mainly consisted of reminders and the occasional random thoughts that popped up in my mind. That day, I had run into a friend at the bus stop; we had met at the beginning of freshman year, but I hadn’t seen her in a while. I also read an interesting science news article that day, so I wrote about that since I would probably forget all about it if I didn’t. I gave the document a title, initially called, “Daily Notes.” In itself, the document was quite messy: continuous bullet points roughly organized into the categories of “Something that made me think,” “Something I wonder” and “Something that made me happy.” If it was any more complicated, I would not have remained consistent with it.
Over the next couple of weeks, I began to look forward to filling in these “Daily Notes.” Doing this not only gave me a chance to truly pause and reflect on what happened that day, but it also allowed me to cultivate a whole list of moments to look back on. These moments aren’t the ones that first come to mind. For instance, on Aug. 18, I came across the quote, “What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals,” penned by Zig Ziglar. This left me feeling inspired, though that feeling is easy to forget.
At some point, I renamed this notes document, “The Daily Chai,” because these were all thoughts I would have if I were to hypothetically drink chai, or spiced black tea. Now, I glance back at the scattered moments written in my Notes app and smile. This comfort wraps around me, grounding me in the present and reminding me to seek beauty in the mundane.
Sareena Naganand is a sophomore from Piscataway, N.J. majoring in Biomedical Engineering. Her column, “The Daily Chai,“ is about finding happiness in simple, insignificant moments: the kind that makes us smile, wrapping around us like the warmth that comes from drinking a cup of tea.
