Walking down the hall from my room to the living room, I already know what I am about to encounter. I skip (in reality I’m walking, but I’m skipping emotionally) down the hall and turn the corner to find my roommate doing a crossword at our dining room table. She has an iced coffee in a mason jar and a metal straw to one side of the booklet, and a plate of everything bagel seasoning seeds sprawled across the small plate on the other side. Every morning, my eyes know what they are about to see and my heart should be able to anticipate the positive emotion that will soon follow. But somehow, every morning, I am unbelievably surprised by the feeling of immediate comfort which enters my body.
I skip (now, actually skipping — its not weird unless you make it weird) into the kitchen and pop a coffee pod into our espresso machine. I open the cabinet above my head and manhandle the pre-sliced bagel that remains still attached at either end, determined that I can split it in half without making a mess of the everything seasoning. Every morning, when I have this exact thought process, I am met with the exact same result. Bagel seeds flying everywhere and the bagel ripped so unevenly that one side will barely fit into the toaster, while the thinner half will get overly browned. Maybe I’ll use a knife tomorrow to avoid the same pattern (I won’t).
I take my unevenly toasted bagel and iced latte and make my way to our dining room table. I find a way to sit in my chair in the most unconventional way possible, as I do every morning. I take a sip of the coffee and I am in awe with how perfectly sweet and refreshing its contents are. You would think after eight months of drinking the same coffee out of the same mug at the same dining room table it would lose its unexpected effect, but it never does.
And I sit at the table, while my roommate is finishing her crossword (no hints, pure skill). My roommate and I chat about either a bizarre dream one of us had or how we didn’t go asleep for another two hours after we said goodnight. She does the New York Times connections. I bring up some facet of my sister’s life for no reason. We’re glued to our seats at the dining room table and we talk about what our lives will be like ten years in the future. And all of a sudden it’s been an hour and a half. It happens every morning and I am always stunned by the consistency.
If I walk down that hallway and am met with the same girl doing a crossword every morning, which then evokes the same sense of indescribable comfort every time, there should be no reason for my surprise. Pavlov is yelling at my psychology major brain, wondering why the concept of classical conditioning hasn’t clicked in my own life if I can answer a question about it on a multiple choice exam. But when I have existed in a world of inconsistency for almost two decades, a pleasant, consistent routine comes as a surprise to my brain, no matter how much it thinks it understands the psychology behind it. I have had enough experiences of finally allowing myself to accept a comforting feeling, only for it to immediately be stolen from my grip. A grip which I allowed myself to loosen when I assumed that the routine would persist. But it never did, as time and time again, I lost hold of what I thought I had so securely. With every example I have of a pattern abruptly changing, I stopped letting myself believe it was possible to be have consistency.
But now, I sit at our table every morning with an unevenly toasted bagel and iced coffee. I sit in the serenity and soak in the consistency.