Tiny Tea Tales: Overseasoned

Autumn pops with vitality. Why should life be any different?

There’s no such thing as too much cinnamon. Not in my books, at least.

Today my slippier-than-usual hands accidently produced a cup of masala chai with enough spice to snap the soul to attention.

But, as it turned out, all that extra spice was drop-dead delicious. And it did right by the day.

Sure, for a brief moment, I lost contact with my entrails and the world. It was just past 7 in the morning, and the air outside (and inside) was rife with a creamy coolness that punctuates early autumn weeks in Bangalore. When the weather tempers, life around here gets a lot better. You can step out and stay out longer. Everywhere you look, you can spot bright yellow trumpets and firey red phoenix flowers — on tree tops and along street sides. A soft breeze makes rounds throughout the day, carrying a whiff of sweet flowers mixed with foliage, gently rustling and rushing through the greens and browns of the normally ordinary-looking trees. The sky always takes on the brightest shade of blue and you will remember it for that — the silken sea-blue shade, reaching as far as the eye goes, free from cloudy folds. There’s less russet around this part of the world this time of the year. Less decay and less wilting, too. If anything, everything gets a little brighter, bolder, and bigger. Everywhere you turn, there’s more texture, more color, and more scent. Everything is extra and without apology!

See it enough and you will begin to crave this big-ness. So much aesthetic consciousness enters your eyes and spirit, that you will want to hold it and live it with everything that’s within reach — from clothes to food.

And unlike summer or winter, autumn does not legislate what you can and cannot do. All the joy there is and can be is a result of the possibilities you can conceive and create. Instead of prescribing to you what must be, I realize the object of autumn is to give you the chance to imagine what things can be.

So, at no point should you just hum along. You mustn’t surrender to living in narrow circles. Nor must you live at an arms’s length. In fact, you must move through these short few weeks with all you can — feeling, touching, and living every day with imagination, always tapping the chance to go a little extra and without apology.

Sure some activities are good and wholesome in themselves — wearing your favorite sweater, taking a walk around the park, making a generous serving of chai. And you can do these for their own sake and they cultivate immense joy for the spirit. But autumn is when you can spike these with imagination and rouse them into bigness. Just like everything else outside.

I guess that was the point of today’s happy accident — a nudge and dare to be more.