In addition to tennis with Z, much of my pandemic social life has been with my office mates David and Adam, whom I might term Adam the Younger. The latter is a younger fellow and, like many of the well-educated folx in their 30s, a bit of a foody (though also a hell of an athlete, so he eats what he wants to). As such, he has high standards for coffee, which we enjoy each afternoon around 2. While our household has a preference for ground coffee, being of the slacker late Boomer/Gen X vintage, Adam the Younger of course likes his beans whole, so he can grind them himself.
So when I brought in coffee for our shared enjoyment yesterday, I brought beans rather than ground. "I like the process of grinding them," he explained. "At home I even use a hand grinder."
Ah yes, The Process. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a discussion I had recently with David (my other office mate) about Judaism, Christianity, and their respective theories of salvation (this-worldly Judaism vs. other-worldly Christianity), and I have been reflecting on this discussion as I come to the end of this book by Abraham Joshua Heschel and he talks about piety and holiness in Judaism, which he very much grounds in the performance of everyday actions, in a calm but not harshly judgmental striving towards adherence. The Process.
On with it.
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