There are consistent life events that I look forward to every morning.

The “plunge” is one of them.

It is a quiet pleasure to be able to push the plunger of the french press down into the murky coffee depths and enjoy my first cup of coffee of the morning.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that…unless I’m naked in a rainstorm and for some reason don’t have a care in the world.

That would be simpler…but it’s not going to happen, so I’ll go with this coffee thing that I’m working on.

It’s simple…it’s quiet…it’s early in the morning and I’m the only one up and….it’s quiet.

I love the quiet.

We went out to the West Coast a couple of summers ago, and after I’d used up my two weeks of vacation from the Post Office, I flew back from Denver while Jenny and the kids stayed in Colorado for an extra couple of weeks of visiting her family.

When I got back to the house, it was quiet.

It was so quiet.

Wheeeeeeeee! It’s quiet!! Alright….a whole two weeks of quiet!!! Wheeeeeeee!!

That lasted for about 5 minutes.

After 5 minutes, “wheeeeeeeee!!!!!” became “whoaaaaaaaaaaaa.”

It was too quiet. It was lonely quiet.

I didn’t like that quiet. I needed someone talking to me…I needed someone crawling into my lap for a story…I needed some “family noise”.

I missed them. It was really too quiet for my tastes.

Now, before I got married and we had our family, I lived alone.

I lived alone for quite a while.

I had a long time to get used to quiet.

I was a solitary man. I was a satellite. I orbited and never landed. I was alone.

And…I got used to quiet.

Solitude can be a good thing. It’s a time for quiet reflection. A person can really burrow into themselves if they have a chance. You can really work at struggling to figure things out.

And after you’ve struggled for a while with trying to come to an understanding of “what makes you tick”, sometimes you just give up and say, “Oh, what the heck?! I’m a kook.”

When you spend all your time with yourself, I think sometimes you’re like a guest who’s outlasted his welcome.

I can only stand so much self-absorption. Even I have my limits when it comes to self-absorption. Sometimes I need a distraction from myself.

So now this coffee’s ready to be plunged. Now this coffee is ready to be plunged and enjoyed.

I’m going to enjoy this coffee and also enjoy the realization that, even though I love my quiet time in the morning and I love my solitary coffee ritual, the thing that makes it enjoyable is that soon I’ll have the contrast of everybody being up and the day swinging into noisy gear.

If I didn’t have the thing I’ve grown used to…the thing that I think that I take pleasure in escaping for a moment before everybody gets up…if I didn’t have that to look forward to…

I think that the solitary “plunge” would drive me stir crazy.

And I’m not just talking about cream in the java.

This coffee’s pretty good.