The bliss of the quiet café

Dear reader,

There is a small café about three streets from our apartment that I go to most Wednesday afternoons, around three or four o'clock, for a single small cup of coffee and about an hour of sitting at the same table by the window. The café is quiet on Wednesday afternoons. The owner knows me by sight, brings the coffee without me having to order, and otherwise leaves me alone for the hour. The cost of the coffee is two euros and forty cents. The cost of the hour is approximately zero.

I am writing about this small habit today because it has, over the four years I have been doing it, become one of the most reliably restorative practices in my week, and I am not sure I would have predicted, four years ago, that something this small could matter as much as it does.

What the small Wednesday hour contains

Nothing specific. I bring a book sometimes. I bring a small notebook sometimes. Most often I bring nothing and spend the hour looking out the window at the small slow traffic on the street, or watching the small movements inside the café, or letting the mind drift while the coffee slowly cools. There is no productive output from the hour. The hour is, by deliberate design, not for anything.

On the case for a third place

There is a sociological concept, originally from Ray Oldenburg, of the third place — a public space that is neither home nor work, where the small life of a community can happen. The classic examples are pubs, cafés, barbershops, libraries. The third place serves a small structural function in a life — it provides a setting outside the home where the small daily restoration of being in public, but at ease, can happen.

Most modern lives, especially since the small shift to remote work that affected so many people in recent years, have lost the third place. The home has become both the home and the work, and the office, where it still exists, has become a place of obligation rather than community. The third place — the small quiet café where I am known by sight and otherwise left alone — has become, in some way, more important than it would have been twenty years ago.

If you do not have a third place in your week, look for one. The criteria are simple. It should be within walking distance of where you live. It should be a place where you can sit for an hour without pressure to leave or to order more. It should be a place where the staff know you well enough to leave you alone but not so well that they expect conversation. The Wednesday afternoon visit, weekly for a few months, will make whatever café you have chosen into your café, and the small ongoing structural support of having such a place will, over years, become one of the small reliable parts of being a person with a life in a city.

Until next Wednesday,

M.