Coffee Talk
August 23, 2025
Writer: Ruby Chase
Editors: Rena Geula & Ava Malkin
Photo: Pinterest
When I am home from school, I wake up to the sunrise leaking through my shades and a roaring wave of anxious excitement drowns my mind. Immediately, I have to get out of bed. It’s time for coffee talk!
My dad and I are both natural early risers, up at the crack of dawn ready to get on with the most productive hours of our day. The morning does not truly begin until I’ve had at least three cups of coffee, but we are bright and sprightly nonetheless.
When I come home from school, we are fortunate to have each other’s company while everybody is still asleep. Whether driving to the surf break or talking over the kitchen counter to procrastinate putting on a cold, damp wetsuit, the morning hours are surrendered to coffee talk. Contrary to the bitter undertones of our beverages, our conversations are filled with novel ideas, valuable reflections, productive arguments, and the occasional life lesson. No matter how important it is to get out for a surf during the windless, early morning hours, we both silently agree to forgo perfect conditions to continue talking.
While I might be on school vacation, conversation over coffee with my dad is my most enlightening pastime, showing how simple conversation with others opens our eyes and our minds to endless learning opportunities.
Coffee acts as a forum for us to brew up meaningful time for conversation. It is a prop that facilitates fruitful interaction to occur around it. Perhaps serving the opposite purpose of a face-down phone on the table, it symbolizes engagement: I am listening, and I have nowhere else I would rather be right now. While we can claim to be ‘going out for coffee,’ we should be much more interested in the intentional effort to slow down and sit face to face with another human being as both a means and an end in itself.
The more we converse with each other in these “coffee talks,” the better we get at it. Our society today has grown accustomed to communication where we can spend minutes, hours, or days typing and retyping our responses. This intermediary diminishes our ability to be spontaneous and thorough during face-to-face interactions. But what I notice when talking to my dad is that filters slowly recede, and we start to say what we believe, not what seems right. Gradually, a forcefield of fearless expression and unapologetic curiosity forms. We can break away from the plague of social awkwardness and stifled expression the more we practice real-life, one-on-one conversations.
We should seek to create this forcefield with our classmates, our friends, our family, and our mentors. By breaking from our new norm of digital conversation, we can return to creativity and critical thinking and promote positive, argumentative interactions. Instead of being lectured in an auditorium where everyone desperately needs more caffeine, coffee talk offers a learning environment where every participant becomes both student and professor, collaborating to craft a unique and intricate intellectual experience.
Be an agent of change, engage in coffee talk whenever and with whoever. Express genuine curiosity and don’t be afraid to make challenging statements. Replace the face-down phone with a coffee cup; show you are a good listener. And take it outside the cafe, to the running trail, the kitchen counter, or the bus stop.
