BEAUTY IN THE TRANSITION

I saw a flame-red plant creeping over a wall today. It was vibrant against the grey morning, amid the raindrops that curled over the edges of its russet leaves.

That’s autumn, right there, I thought. Fiery leaf from the heart of the sun, curling in the rain, over a sopping garden wall. Rain pattered from my hood. I stopped and ran a wet finger under the leaves.

There’s so much beauty in the transition, isn’t there? We don’t always like change, and as everything hurtles and accelerates, we sometimes lose the things that we like to hold on to. I think autumn might be able to teach us how to transition in beauty, even when it’s soggy and miserable. That little plant, just a tiny fragment of Earth’s foliage was erupting with colour at the end of a summer that deserved its majesty.

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Anyway, I wax on. The other truth is that that little blast of colour had completely interrupted me thinking about the relationship between tea strength and the number of tea bags you put in the teapot. I do have a theory. But then, I have lots of theories, and my friends still roll their eyes most of the times I say ‘I have a theory’...

But what if it’s not a linear relationship?

What if two tea bags makes a pot that’s more than twice as strong as a pot with one tea bag? I’m not saying it’s logarithmic like the Richter Scale (or nearly quite as important), I’m just wondering whether it’s a log-base-something-or-other relationship. And what about the size of the teapot? Is there an easy way to calculate exactly how much tea you need, rather than the old ‘teaspoon per person and one for the pot’ rule, which by the way, wasn’t necessarily as linear as you might think. What is the effect of a lot of tea swimming around in boiling water? Does it diffuse differently when there’s more of it?

I’m glad I was interrupted by nature. Some thoughts are more important than others.