One tablespoon of honey.
“Alright,” I say as I grab the measuring spoon. The white one. The one I got from IKEA.
I open the honey bottle and squeeze the air out of it. The honey starts to slowly drop from the bottom of the bottle toward the top (I’m holding it upside down). And I mean slooowwly. Honey is never in a rush. It takes its sweet old time.
I’m making pumpkin pancakes, if you were curious. One of my fall traditions. Pumpkin pancakes with cinnamon honey butter. It makes you feel all cozied up when you have pancakes, a nice little hot drink of your choosing, a good book, a soft blanket… the sun is golden and dipping everything it touches in honey shades of color.
The sky is blue with occasional clouds drifting through. These clouds are absolutely booking it, they must be in a hurry today. Maybe clouds have places to be as well.
I stare into the bowl full of flour, pumpkin puree, cinnamon, ginger, pumpkin spice, milk, and all the other goodies. The honey is slowly making its way to the tablespoon in a golden ribbon. Still slow, like it’s trying to get to know this new material, this new place. Introductions are a must.
It always seems like honey is cautious, careful, maybe a tad shy. Always curious, but always intentional.
My spoon is full now, and as I try to stop the honey from overflowing, I stop squeezing the bottle. But honey doesn’t stop like that, it takes its sweet old time. Now the spoon overflows a little, and the overflow falls straight into the white bowl full of the concoction.
I turn the spoon upside down, once again, trying to help the honey reach its next destination. We play the same game, and slowly it starts drifting towards the other ingredients. Now I have this long golden ribbon between the bowl and the spoon. And slowly it falls into the bowl. Taking its sweet old time. It’s the slow golden stretch that never quite ends.
Clouds drift by in a hurry, time keeps moving on, but this honey doesn’t care.
If honey were a music genre, it would be smooth jazz. Slowly making you sway from side to side. Dancing, having the time of your life.
It’s like the honey has formed a new relationship with the tablespoon and doesn’t want to leave just yet. A new friend. So, the honey gets stuck to the spoon.
Most of it is in the bowl, but the honey has now coated the rest of the spoon and won’t leave. It has claimed the spoon. No matter how much you shake or tap the spoon, the honey won’t leave.
“Well,” I say. I head for another spoon to help scoop it out.
Honey makes me think of those slow nights we had at our flea market that we ran for a few years.
Whenever there was bad weather or some kind of holiday or just an hour before we closed… time was moving more slowly. It was often quiet. Peaceful. With only a handful of people coming in and out. It was nice. It was cozy. You could do whatever you wanted behind the counter—I usually ended up doing schoolwork or reading a book. We always had this old tune radio station on, which played various hits from the 70s to the 80s.
It was like honey. Mellow. Golden. Slow. Time took its sweet old time to progress forward.
Those nights reminded me that not everything worth keeping moves fast. The thing about quiet moments is, you only notice their sweetness when you slow down long enough to taste it.
The honey on the tablespoon is slowly leaving the spoon behind. And maybe, some sweetness just takes its time leaving. Unlike normal sugar, it just falls out all at once.
I think gratitude works like honey. It’s sweet, and it takes its time leaving.
Gratitude is the antidote to stressing and worrying.
Being grateful for something means you have to go out of your way to do it.
I used to take everything for granted. Something as simple as waking up. I woke up, complained about the world or something aching or whatever the heck was wrong that day. And then moved on and found about a million other reasons why I can’t be happy now and why things are bad. It was so easy.
I was glad I was alive, but was I grateful? Not really. I took it for granted. I had a job, but it sucked. That led me to think there was no reason to be grateful for it. I didn’t realize that just the fact that I had a job alone means I should be grateful. I just thought that because I wasn’t where I wanted to be, I shouldn’t be grateful.
And so, I rarely ever felt gratitude. I thought being grateful meant saying ‘thank you,’ without ever truly feeling it. Without ever truly feeling the gratitude.
It wasn’t until I had my health scares and other unfortunate events that I started to look into what gratitude really means. What gratitude really is. Because I felt so lucky to be here still. That woke me up, it made me think that this is real gratitude.
I started enjoying going to work, because I get to. I started enjoying moving my body because I get to. Everything just shifted. Even something as simple as taking out the trash—I get to. A lot of people can’t say the same.
I started to feel better. I stopped worrying about the world as much because I kept finding reasons to feel grateful for it. Even when the headlines are saying everything but.
The funny thing is, the more I was grateful for one thing, the more it spilled over to other things. Like the honey-filled spoon. It started to affect other areas of my life. And soon, I was overwhelmed, in a good way, by gratitude.
And once you enter the world of gratitude, once you truly feel grateful for something, like honey in the spoon, it takes its sweet old time leaving. It makes you feel lighter. It stains everything with a golden hue.
What if we all lived like honey did? Took our time, lingered, left an imprint on things? We wouldn’t be rushing. We wouldn’t be clumping, just moving slow and sweet.
The news and the social media scroll fast, heck, they encourage it. The traffic is almost always in a rush. But honey does not. Neither does gratitude.
Not only is honey sweet, it’s also healing. Perhaps you’re suffering from a sore throat, cold, or a flu. And you mix some honey in your tea. It makes the world of a difference. You instantly feel better. It’s not only soothing for your body and mind, but also healing. So is gratitude. Maybe you’re feeling down or sad about the world. Once you start feeling gratitude, truly feeling it, you’ll start noticing all the things that are right in the world, one by one, little by little, you slowly begin to heal.
Honey soothes sore throats. Gratitude soothes sore hearts.
The tablespoon’s empty now, the teaspoon’s sticky, and somehow there’s honey on my elbow. But maybe that’s the point, gratitude gets everywhere once you start using it.
Maybe that’s what gratitude really is, the slow gold that holds the world together. The light that spills quietly across a kitchen counter. The warmth between people who take the time to say “thank you” and mean it. The world rushes and scrolls and honks its way forward, but underneath it all, there’s this steady hum of sweetness, still dripping, still shimmering, still reminding us that even here, even now, there’s so much left to love.
Anyway, the pancake’s burning. And I should probably clean up this honey before I start turning it into metaphors about wisdom.
Thank you for this meditation on honey and enjoying life.