This story originally appeared on the Gents Cafe Newsletter. You can subscribe here.
It was a hot, humid mid-July morning in Hanoi. Ninety plus degrees mixed with 95% humidity meant that the ice in my Vietnamese coffee was already melting by the time I sat down. I was sitting inside The Note Coffee, a café blanketed floor-to-ceiling in thousands of post-it notes left by travelers from around the world.
I read through many of them. Wishes for a better life, hellos to loved ones, life lessons left for the next stranger who pulled up a chair. One note, however, stood out. “Slow down and enjoy”.
I sat with the note for a while, and then I realized that I already was. I had gone out of my way that morning, weaving through Hanoi traffic on a rented moped, to find this café, and I was taking in every moment. I was tasting my coffee. Listening to the buzz of conversations around me. Taking in the heat, the aroma, the strange and beautiful chaos of Hanoi in July. I was fully present. I was alive in that moment in a way that I rarely am back home.
Travel has a way of doing that. It shows you where you’ve been living life on autopilot.
In New York, my mornings run on repeat. Same commute, same cold brew from the same café, consumed without tasting a single sip. It’s not a coffee experience. It’s a caffeine injection. I’ve traded something slow and sensory for something efficient and forgettable.
I’m not against routine. Structure is what lets me make progress, hit goals, and show up consistently. But there’s a limit to how much structure serves you before it dulls you. That’s why I love to travel. Traveling makes me experience the world like a child again, where every moment is new and nothing is taken for granted.
In Hanoi, a cup of coffee feels like an event. Because it is. The number of mornings I’ll spend in that city is finite. That scarcity makes time slow down. It’s not magic, it’s just attention.
So I’ve been working on something since I got back: incorporating that same intentionality into my everyday. Treating the morning coffee like it matters. Because it does — just as much in a Midtown café as it does in Hanoi. Recognizing that an ordinary Tuesday morning is worth remembering. After all, I’ll only get each one once.
We live in a world that rewards speed and efficiency, where nearly every friction point can be automated away. That makes it easy to sleepwalk through your own life. But presence isn’t something you find on a trip to Southeast Asia, it’s a practice available to you anywhere, in any café. It’s choosing on any “ordinary” Tuesday, to actually taste your coffee.
Every day is a story worth telling. All it takes is slowing down enough to actually enjoy it.
