This month we celebrate that beautiful emotion with Valentine’s Day at the center of it all. However, you really don’t need the reminder as it’s hard to miss the explosion of red and pink hearts everywhere you look. As with many holidays, Valentine’s Day has become very commercialized over the years. As soon as the winter holiday season is over candies, cards, and other goodies seem to magically fill store shelves. Then the prices of roses spike and the cacophony of Valentine’s marketing grows louder and louder until its crescendo on the 14th. Sometimes the holiday can feel superficial and miss the true beauty of love and why it’s important we celebrate it in our lives.
Love gives us a sense of purpose. No matter who you are, what you do, or where you find yourself in life, love, consciously or subconsciously, has undoubtedly been a driver. Some people overlook it and don’t realize it until it’s lost. However, many others are open to love’s daily offerings in activities, conversations, encounters, experiences, and actions.
Love sometimes shows up as big, grand, and loud showings of affection, while other times acts of love are simple and comparatively small. No matter the size of act, it’s always the thoughtfulness behind it that yields the most tremendous impact and leaves the most lasting imprint of love. That’s why size and grandeur does not matter when it comes to love. Sure, big, loud, and expensive can still be authentic and certainly fun. But I’ve found it’s the little things that move the mountains within our hearts.
Take for example making a cup of coffee.
With each cup there is a lot of love poured in. From the backbreaking labor to plant, grow, and harvest the beans, to the intention and passion placed in how they are roasted, to the care taken in brewing the “perfect cup” (sometimes with an extra artistic flourish of foam), there is passion and love at each step of the way in any truly good cup of joe.
In our house, it goes even one step further, in choosing just the right mug to serve it in. For many years Carolyn and I have found great pleasure in delivering to each other what we’ve started calling a morning cup of love.
It’s so fun to anticipate your partner’s enjoyment when buying beans in advance (sometimes planning it weeks ahead to order the favorite blends from Oregon or Costa Rica) and the most fun in picking the mug of the day. Our kitchen cabinet is stocked to the brim with mugs with inspirational, loving, and funny sayings. It’s come to be an expression of our feelings for each other and the day ahead.
We know this experience with coffee is not unique to us. There’s a billion-dollar coffee industry to tell us. That said it still never ceases to amaze us when we witness the power just a simple cup of coffee can bring to others.
Take the experience our legal assistant, Marti, recently had when she made our new dear clients what can only be described as a magical cup of coffee. The care and love they felt in her act of offering and then making them a cup just the way they liked it and then later giving them a home-baked zucchini bread to enjoy with it, resulted in a deep admiration and the most touching act. On her birthday, these dear clients sent her a handmade card. For them, the small gesture of a cup of coffee left a lasting imprint of love.
Throughout this month think about how and to whom you will serve your daily cup of love and the positive impact it will have.
Remember, as Dr. Seuss said, “to the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.”
