Cute Cafe

My cousin was visiting Lisbon from Canada, and we were trying to find a time for the two of us to walk one morning while the rest his family were sleeping. They were staying at an Airbnb around the corner. I suggested 10:30am, expecting him to say yes, however instead he told me that was one of his favourite times of the day, because it was when him and his family would find a cute Lisbon cafe and just be present together.

It brought a big smile to my face to read. Something about the plainness of it, the way he said it without any further explanation needed, and the way he'd clearly thought about it before.

Later that morning, while on our walk, he said something similar about their whole trip. They'd crossed an ocean with the kids, and the moments he appreciated most weren't the big ones. They were the quiet, small ones. The unremarkable stretches where everyone was simply there, together, not rushing toward the next thing.

That opened up a longer conversation between us about how happiness isn't really thought or achieved. It's felt.

This quiet contentment that arrives when I'm present with whatever is happening and whoever I'm with. Not the past replaying, not the future being planned, just the thing or person that's actually here.

It's the same feeling I experience in a flow state, when the worry drops away and I'm absorbed entirely in what I'm doing. And talking with my cousin, I realized how rarely I actually land there over the course of an ordinary day.

I wake up, and before my feet touch the floor, my mind is already sorting through the day ahead, ranking what needs to happen. I sit down to meditate, and my mind begins reviewing yesterday, or chasing some idea that pulled me sideways. I begin a morning yoga routine that's so familiar that my mind wanders even further into my day. I make breakfast with a podcast in my ear, learning something I think I need to know right away. I eat with my wife and we talk about what the day requires of us. I open my computer, read the news, answer emails, check in with the AI agents building things for me while I slept. The whole day is a forward lean, one action tipping into the next.

That's what stayed with me after my cousin left. The favourite moments of a day, a week, a year, maybe a whole life, tend to be the ones we least expect. They're rarely the ones we planned or paid for. They're the pause between the planned things, the coffee, the walk, the stretch of quiet where nobody needs anything. They're free, and they're everywhere, and I walk past them constantly because I'm busy building toward something that feels more important.

And here's where it gets strange. My cousin found that mid-morning cafe feeling in Lisbon. To get there, he booked flights across the Atlantic ocean, arranged an Airbnb, coordinated schedules around several adult kids, took time away from work, packed suitcases, and re-arranged normal life. All of that machinery, all those expenses and logistics, to arrive at a quiet coffee with the people he'd be sitting next to anyway back home.

The moment itself cost nothing. Everything around the moment cost a great deal.

I've done the same thing more times than I can count. Flown somewhere far to finally slow down. Booked the retreat to remember how to breathe. Waited for the trip, the weekend, the change of scenery, before letting myself simply sit and be with someone. As if presence were a place I had to travel to, rather than something already available in my own kitchen on a Tuesday morning.

I keep wanting to conclude that the arrangements are unnecessary, that I should be able to find the cute cafe feeling at home without the flights and the packing. And maybe that's true. But I'm not sure it's the whole truth. There's something about crossing the ocean that seems to give permission to pause. The trip isn't the point, and somehow the trip is also what makes the point possible.

My cousin texted a day after they flew home. He said the trip had been wonderful, and the thing he kept thinking about was that mid-morning coffee. I read it standing in my kitchen, mid-morning, a cup of ginger tea cooling beside me on the counter, my wife somewhere in the next room. The exact moment he'd flown across the world to find was sitting right there in my hands, and I'd almost walked past it to answer his message.