heroic leadership

Can you believe what I'm reading these days? Heroic Leadership by Chris Lowney. Last week it was Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.

I'm reading them for my class on Leadership. And I look with longing at my bookshelf, with John Grisham and Stephen King books winking at me.

I have to groan, but I also have to admit that I have learned a lot from these books. My learning logs, required after every session, have been moments of self-discovery. Some are not pleasant. Some force me to confront the kind of person that I thought I was not. Some make me re-think the ways I have been raising my children.

So yes, I don't enjoy them as much as I do the novels, but they do expand my reading list, and sometimes Corelli's Mandolin gets stale. And if I want to be entertained, there's always the International Herald Tribune in the morning.

a cup of coffee

I got to the office very early today, so to wake myself up I got a cup of Cafe Americano at San Francisco Coffee. Now I'm drinking it with some peanut butter cookies, and I burned my tongue already.

Most days it's Cafe Americano with milk and sugar, but sometimes-- when I didn't get enough sleep the previous night, or it's shaping up to be a looong day-- I get a Hazelnut Latte. It's good enough to make me look forward to bad days. :-)

These morning coffees are expensive. My small cup costs more than my Meal-of-the-Day lunch at the cafeteria. Which means that my coffee budget for a week will buy me 53 sachets of 3-in-1 hazelnut coffee mix. (Hmm. This is actually the first time I computed it. Makes me think twice about next week's coffee.)

So I contemplated for a while why this coffee tastes better than my morning coffee at home. I can make it as strong as I want, or load it with cream, and I can choose what bread to go with it. Also, my 8-year-old daughter makes a mean cup of coffee, but with the effort and love she puts in it, it's already lukewarm by the time it's served.

So after 30 minutes of drinking this expensive cup, I figured out why.

I take this coffee at a leisurely pace, when I'm already in the office and not rushing to get dressed for work. I get to savor every sip, and I don't have to gulp it down because I'm next in line for the bathroom. And since it costs a pretty penny, I drink it to the last drop.

This is printed on every table napkin of San Francisco Coffee: Life is Good. Learning for the day? Like my coffee, life should not be taken at haste. We cannot always be running after things, like a bigger house, a promotion, a nicer car. There should be a moment to savor little joys, small wins, even waiting for the rain to stop, if it means a few more minutes to kiss the baby before going out of the house. Like my coffee, life is expensive. We have to cherish every last drop of it, even if it burns us at times.