Simple Pleasure Complex

Tea: Mandarin Green with Honey

Music: Cheb Tarik, "L'Histoire"

Time: Night.

One cup of spiced tea, flavored with honey. Three minutes to heat the water, three more to steep.

Six minutes to happiness, right?

Far ... very far ... from it.

Someone -- more precisely, a series of someones -- had to plant and tend the tea plants, harvest the tea, dry the tea, season the tea, package the tea, ship the tea, purchase and send the tea (the last step involving an entire sub-series of someones.)

Other someones planted and nurtured orange trees, picked the fruit, peeled the fruit, dried the peel and added it to the tea.

Still more someones harvested the cinnamon, ground it and put it into the mix.

Meanwhile, somewhere else, flowers grew. Bees visited the flowers, went home and made honey. A beekeeper harvested it. Someone else bottled it. Other someones packed it, transported it and stocked it at the market.

Think we're done yet? Hardly.

The electric teakettle, from inventor's spark to yet more shipping someones, passed through who knows how many lives. How many people built the water treatment plant, built and laid the mains, designed and manufactured the fixtures and hooked up the plumbing? How many more put together the power grid, ran the lines, wired the outlet (and made the tools that made that task possible)?

And we haven't even talked about the mug ...

Simple pleasures don't just magically appear out of thin air. They have roots reaching eons deep. All the more reason to appreciate them, I'd say.