Hazelnut Lattes & Bananas

My regular coffee order is a hazelnut latte with skim. The owner of Hob Knobb Coffee knows me well enough to ask, “You want your usual?” when I walk in the door. If someone is working the counter with him, he tells them which mug I like best. It’s a black one with a rounded bottom.

“There’s something to the heft of it,” I explain while paying for my drink, trying to rationalize my request for a special mug. But, I’m not new to this rodeo – it’s not so much the mug as the pattern of it all. The habit. I like what I like, and I usually like it over and over again.

I take my regular seat at a high top table by the door, peel back my banana, and start my work. Me, my hazelnut latte, banana and laptop. There’s a comfort even in typing it.

The way I blow dry my hair. Fold towels. Apply my eye make up.

I haven’t missed a day walking or jogging three-plus miles for the last two months.

There is a mediation in routine. In finding a path and following it so often it becomes a practice – an art.

It’s January 1. If ever there was a decidedly perfect date to create new beginnings, this is it. I write daily for my work – a career I love so much I giggle when I confide to friends how much I love my job.

But I want to take today to lay claim to a new kind of writing – a new beginning for my writing.

I’m putting a stake in the ground for a new routine, here at my usual coffee shop, at my usual high top table, with my now nearly finished hazelnut latte and already eaten banana. My new blog.

This year will not be about wanting to write more – it will be about the practice of writing. The habit of it. The art.