The Grind

I’ve been thinking about coffee again.

Not in the “I need caffeine to function like a normal human” way—though, let’s be honest, that’s also true—but in the way it mirrors everything I’m trying to do when I sit down to write.

Stay with me.

This morning, I stood at the kitchen counter with my little hand grinder (because I’m that person now, apparently) and watched whole beans tumble into the chamber. Dark, glossy, inert. Beautiful in their way, but useless. You can’t brew whole beans. You can stare at them all you like, admire their potential, tell yourself you’ll get to them later. But they’re not *doing* anything. They’re just sitting there, locked up tight.

Sound familiar?

Because that’s exactly what an idea feels like before you do the work. It’s whole. It’s perfect in your head. It’s got everything you need—the flavour, the kick, the thing that made you excited in the first place. But it’s sealed. Untouched. And it’ll stay that way until you decide to break it open.

So you grind.

You twist the handle, apply pressure, make it messy. There’s noise. There’s effort. Your wrist starts to ache a bit if you’re using one of those manual contraptions like a hipster martyr. But then—*then*—the smell hits you. That sudden release of aroma that fills the room and reminds you why you bothered in the first place.

That’s the moment the idea starts to come alive.

You’ve broken it down. You’ve made it usable. And now you can actually *do* something with it.

But here’s the thing: it has to be fresh.

Pre-ground coffee from a bag that’s been sitting in your cupboard for three weeks? It’s fine. Functional. It’ll wake you up. But it’s not *alive*. The oils have oxidised. The volatile compounds—the stuff that makes it *sing*—have evaporated. You’re drinking a shadow of what it could’ve been.

Same with creativity.

You can’t work with stale ideas. You can’t phone it in with something you ground up months ago and left sitting around. You can’t use someone else’s pre-packaged version and expect it to feel like yours. You have to grind it fresh, in the moment, when you’re ready to brew.

And then—*then*—you’ve still got to brew the damn thing.

You need heat. You need water. You need time and patience and the right conditions for extraction. Too rushed and it’s weak, watery, pointless. Too long and it’s bitter, over-extracted, undrinkable. You’ve got to find that sweet spot where everything comes together just right.

The creative process is exactly this. You can’t skip the steeping. You can’t rush the pour. You need to let things develop, sit with them, give them the space to become what they’re meant to be.

And once it’s brewed? Once you’ve poured it into the cup and it’s sitting there, steaming, ready?

You can’t un-brew it.

You’ve committed. The work is done. Now you drink it—or in our case, you hit publish, you send the email, you share the thing—and you see how it lands.

Maybe it’s brilliant. Maybe it’s just okay. Maybe it’s not quite what you thought it would be when it was still whole beans sitting in the bag. But it’s *done*. It’s out there. It’s no longer potential—it’s real.

I think that’s why I keep coming back to this ritual every morning. It’s a reminder that the work matters. That you can’t skip the grind. That freshness counts. That the process—the literal, physical, sometimes frustrating *process*—is where the magic happens.

So if you’ve been sitting on an idea, staring at it like whole beans in a jar, maybe it’s time to grind.

Make it messy. Let it smell. Brew it while it’s fresh.

And then drink the bloody thing.

Until Next Time