What I Learned About Self-Actualization From My Coffee Lady
When we talk about self-actualizing people, most people think of an artist, an innovator of some sort, an athlete, or a person who has left their 9–5 job to travel the world in search of their true self.
What if I told you that one of the best examples of a self-actualizing person that I have come across lately is a lady that makes my coffee on a street stall every day?
And who am I to make that assessment of who is a self-actualizer and who is not?
I am not making that judgment based on my own standards that I came up with.
It’s based on reading the work of Abraham Maslow, the man who dedicated his life to studying self-actualizing people.
When Maslow talks about behaviors leading to self-actualization, the very first thing that he mentions is that:
"Self-actualization means experiencing fully, vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption."
Self-actualizing people learn to engage fully in all the moments of their life, even the mundane ones.
Every morning when I come to buy coffee from this lady, she is there.
And I don’t mean just physically there. I know that her street stall will be there. So many other stalls are there as well.
But she is actually there. She is there with her whole being.
If you’ve ever been to the bank or the supermarket, you will remember at least one moment when the bank teller or the cashier was physically there and did their job, but you could see that the actual person wasn’t there. Their body was performing all the physical movements needed to complete the job, but it was as if there was no one inside that body.
It’s the complete opposite with this lady.
She too, like the bank teller, the supermarket cashier, or the lady on the fruit stall beside her, has a monotonous job. She too, spends all of her working hours repeating the same movements over and over and over again.
But she is fully present for every single movement she makes. Every part of her coffee-making process is performed with such care as if she is trying to make it her best one yet.
"At this moment of experiencing, the person is wholly and fully human. This is a self-actualizing moment. This is a moment when the self is actualizing itself."
- Abraham Maslow
Every morning she greets me with a warm smile.
She then grounds the coffee beans and puts them in the coffee machine.
While the coffee is getting ready, she prepares my takeaway cup. She then folds the napkin around the cup in her own way.
At exactly the time she is done folding the napkin, the coffee is ready.
She pours the coffee into my cup and hands it to me, again with a warm smile.
And every single day, she repeats these same movements over and over again.
She has practiced them so well that there is no empty space between the movements. She’s got it all down to the millisecond.
And like so many other people that do monotonous jobs, she could do it mechanically.
After preparing a cup of coffee so many times, she could do it without putting any thought and care into it, and the coffee would probably still come out the same.
She could do what most people do, and let her body take over and do everything so that her soul can take a leave of absence.
She could spend her working days just going through the motions.
But she is there for every single movement. Fully present.
You can see it best when she is folding the napkin. She has probably done that thousands of times. She could do it with her eyes closed and her brain turned off. Her body would know what to do. But you can see that she is fully there. Not because she is going to do something different. Not because she is making some spectacular decoration out of that napkin. It looks pretty ordinary when she is done with it. But if your eyes and your soul are open to seeing when someone is fully immersed in what they are doing, the napkin stops being ordinary. It becomes a testament to one’s total absorption in the moment.
Rather than being like a robot because she has done this so many times that she doesn’t have to think about it anymore, she is like an artist in a state of flow. She is in the zone. She still doesn’t have to think about the particular movements she is making, but she is also not thinking about anything else. It seems like she just is.
I don’t know if she is passionate about coffee. I don’t know if it was her dream to have her own coffee stall. I don’t even know if it’s her own coffee stand or if she is just working there. And I’m sure she has things in her life that she worries about. At the very least, material things like paying bills, because she is definitely not getting rich from her work.
But somehow, when she makes that coffee, she approaches it like it’s the most important thing in the world at that moment. And not the most important in the sense of heaviness and seriousness. Most important in the sense of letting her whole self be absorbed by that activity, by that very moment. Nothing else matters. Not the bills waiting for her at home or the argument she had with her partner. The only thing that matters is what she is doing right now.
Alan Watts said that "Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes."
I think it is the same with self-actualization.
Self-actualization is not thinking about and anticipating a moment when you are going to reach a new, higher level of your existence.
Self-actualization is about being fully immersed in the things that you have to do at this very moment.
Whether it’s to study for your exams, change your baby’s diapers, or make coffee.
Thank you for reading.
I buy at least 1 cup of coffee from this lady every single day.
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