when coffee meets ballroom [coffee review & reflection]
New year, new coffee and coffee equipment. I decided to pick up an Aeropress and get more serious into home brewing my own coffee. I also had to try the medium roast “Smooth” blend from Carlos Santana Coffee Company when I found out this existed, especially as Smooth by Santana is such a classic song for Latin Cha Cha in ballroom dance. What a way to combine two of my interests!
On the topic of combining interests, a question that has been on my mind lately is to what extent should one’s interests be connected (particularly say between a more ‘serious’ passion and a fun hobby)? It’s something I’ve been thinking about because of course with this post, I consider myself a coffee enthusiast as well as a ballroom dancer, but I’m also recognizing a tendency for me to extrapolate conclusions and find commonalities to everything I do/am involved with together. Be it combining friend groups, or leveraging one interest to help break the ice in conversation (e.g., in a work setting). And while being able to extract common factors and form synergies among seemingly unrelated things can be a helpful skill and something I consider to be a strength of mine, it can also end up leading to homogenizing my life. With everything and everyone you know all in one place, the lines between work and play, informal and formal are now more blurred. It’s harder to step back and take a break (“taking off the figurative mask” we put on depending on the scenario) and explore other circles. Since we know personalities are multi-faceted, we don’t behave or talk the same way when we’re at work versus when we’re socializing with friends. Additionally, blurring these lines may even overshadow the significance and worth of some of our more latent and “quieter” skills and interests. And the pandemic has helped accentuate this now that we are mostly confined to our own spaces with remote work and virtual interactions.
This is something going forward that I’m sure I will ponder more as I think about my goals and just about the future in general. In the meantime, just wanted to appreciate these thoughts with coffee meets ballroom.