I’m flattered to see you again. As a thankyou, I’ll jump right into things this week.
Did you know that it is possible to do everything right and still fail? I won’t take credit for Captain Jean Luke Picard’s great line, but this is a lesson that is hard learned.
Why do I bring this up during my weekly tea blog? Ha, well you are here because you like tea and hopefully you’ve bought some of our blends. You are the people we love seeing at our market booths–curious with refined tastes. If we had a magic wand and could choose the patrons at all of our events we’d wave it in a heartbeat. The trouble is our magic happens in a cup, not with a wand, and we get all kinds of well-meaning people approaching our booth for a sample only to exclaim, “I hate tea!”
I don’t know what provokes this response. Is tea an easy target? I know our country has a history with tea as a symbol of aristocracy and frivolity, but let me ask you readers here if anyone was at the Boston Tea Party that cold December night in 1773? Anybody? Unless this blog reaches across the rainbow bridge, I don’t think any of my readers dressed up in Mohawk “disguises” and pitched barrels of tea into the harbor. For one, that is littering, but also, we are creatures of the present and had no stake in the historical quarrels that we’ve inherited from our probably tired and desperate ancestors.
I digress, what I’m trying to get at is that tea is not for everyone. Secret time, I detest Macaroni and Cheese. Now, I’ll eat it because it is food, but I don’t order Mac and Cheese from a cart and later disparage that proprietor and their product due to my personal sensibilities. That’s not how we roll our leaves if you know what I mean?
I speak of a type of person you cannot please because you may be doing something entirely different than what people in your area are used to. We are after all creatures of habit. In the same breath I’ve had tea haters claim our blends are delicious even though they “hate tea.”
Doing new things is hard. We are using all of our ability to create new flavors using only natural whole ingredients, no fillers or flavorings. Due to the vast effort we dedicate to our craft, we have the resolve to brush off rude comments and continue our search for connoisseurs such as yourselves. In order to get there we have to keep putting one foot in front of the other and have faith in the compliments we receive. Today’s failures may be tomorrow’s blessing, so don’t count a loss you didn’t earn.
Stay bumpy my friends.