Connor Chalfant Sings My Coffee Love Song

Connor Chalfant Sings My Coffee Love Song

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So, I love coffee.

I mean, I really love coffee.

I’m not a full-on coffee snob, but I’m a partial coffee snob. Do not come near me with a can of Folgers. Or Maxwell House. I will take that can of sadness and throw it at your inability to appreciate quality coffee brain. However, I’m not the coffee connoisseur that will drink straight black coffee and reflect on how the beans taste with words like rich and robust. I am the coffee chick that has five different ways to make coffee in her home, and all of them end with a splash of creamer for flavor. That creamer is currently Oreo flavored, and I’m not upset with it.

My favorite coffee shop is Biggby, which is local here to our Mitten State. I get the same thing every time I go there – a triple mocha hot. It’s not on the menu, but it used to be. And since I go there so often, I know that even if it’s not on the menu, it’s still available. That Peppermint Stick Mocha that appears before Christmas? You can actually get it in July if you so desire. Mind blown? You’re welcome.

So now, Biggby has these coffee sleeves – hold on a moment, I need to pause.

One should ALWAYS get a coffee sleeve when they order coffee. Each and every time a barista hands me my cup of happiness and I see that it is sleeveless, I ask for one before I even take it from them. I just don’t understand. The cup is warm, do you want to even take a chance to risk dropping this cup of glory-ness before you get to drink it? It may not be scalding, but why take a chance? Would you place your baby in the passenger seat without a carseat, taking a chance on their safety? No. Don’t do the same with your coffee baby. It deserves better.

Anyway, Biggby now has these coffee sleeves that have quotes on them. I like to read them, and may have even stopped a work meeting so that I could read the quote that a fellow Biggby fan had on his sleeve.

His quote, and one that I had before as well from Connor Chalfant, was this:

“Don’t love to be loved in return. Love for the sake of loving.” Connor Chalfant

So taking a deviation from coffee, but only a slight one because coffee in integral to our wellbeing, both times I have read this quote it has sent me on a reflection journey.

Call me a love skeptic if it’s fitting, but it’s always bothered me how easily people throw around the “L” word. My best friend in high school was once talking about this new girl he was seeing and we were discussing her parents. I asked him what they thought of him, and his response was immediately: “Oh, they love me”. I went on, in my typical overthinking way, to ask: “Really, they love you? They have only known you but a few weeks, you’ve had less than five high level niceties-only conversations with them, and you’re doing unmentionable things with their daughter that I’m sure they’d rather you not be doing…but they love you?”

If it fits, call me a love skeptic. But I think Connor Chalfant has nailed it.

Don’t say it to get it or to inflate your ego. Say it to express true feeling.

I wasn’t even the first one to say I love you in my relationship with my now husband. And I never said it at all with the guy before that, because I didn’t feel it. My husband was a little love happy, I believe. He said it in the first week. I just wasn’t there yet. I am now, thankfully, but then – not so much.

But I just hear it so often. And I have also been guilty of throwing it out there without the correct amount of emotion or feeling that should really go with it. There’s a woman that we coordinate with on some work for my job, she’s wonderful. Her personality is lighthearted and kind, her style is fun and confident, her smile could brighten the gloomiest of people. And I always find myself saying how much I love her. Now, do I really love her? Like italicized love her? No. I probably lowercase regular font love her, which is more of a like+.

She’s wonderful, and I really enjoy being around her, and she makes me smile, but I don’t italicized love her.

When I think of this quote, I think about a few situations in my life where I do love so deeply with nothing in return. Think of your home. And then think of a wall in your home. Imagine yourself dedicating a large amount of time into this wall. You want to take care of it, this is your wall. You want it to know that it is important to you, you give it the nicest paint on the market so it’s protected, and you spend hours researching the best painting techniques so that it looks the greatest it can. Only the finest artwork goes on this wall, and you take time every day to stop and appreciate it for what it is, your wall.

You love that wall.

But that wall….it doesn’t love you.

And I have been there. I have loved a wall a few times in my life. I have put so much in to try to earn that love back. But the wall has been unable to reciprocate the love that I put into it.

And do you know how difficult that is? To love without anything in return? To put your heart out there and have it just left hanging? Like a high five that never gets met, it just dangles there, vulnerable and alone.

And for a love skeptic, I can tell you – the love was pouring out of me each and every time. I truly loved as much as I could love.

Even today, there is so much pain in the non-return portion of those love equations. It’s so hard to put yourself out there and it go unacknowledged, or for your love counterpart to not feel the same. You feel so strongly, but that wall? They are just going about their day. Your strong feelings aren’t anything, they’re appreciated, but not something that is going to make them stop in their tracks and offer anything back, or offer back anything that is at the same level of what you are giving to them.

How does one love just to love? How does one love with the realization that they will not get anything in return? The task sounds simple enough – you just do. You lower that expectation meter and you just do. You secrete the love where needed but you never take any for yourself.

But it’s not that simple. It’s just not.

You can’t throw yourself out there to love everyone and leave yourself out to dry. You need to feel valued, you need to feel important, you need to feel that you are worth other people’s love as well. That is what gives you the energy, the strength and the motivation to continue on with your days. It gives you the ability to propel through dark times and to make yourself the best you can be. It gives you reason to smile.

It’s not something that just one person can take on, but what if everyone in the world adopted this together? That the goal of every living being was to show everyone that they encountered no-strings attached love? The guy changing your oil, the woman ringing up your groceries, the person next to you on the train? What if we were so surrounded by love that we didn’t need to go searching for it, it was just there? Not even intense love, but the high level, the like+ love, the lowercase, regular font love.

Also known as….kindness.

That’s doable. And that kind of love is something that can be spearheaded by one person, which then would spread to two people, then three. Then maybe, possibly, someday, the world. And it’s not leaving anybody loving a wall, because the walls love back. The love goes full circle, and everyone is taken care of.

You’ll still have those who you have bold love for, and those who fall into the italicized love category, but in some ways you can continue the same model while trying to manage expectations. At some point, you will have to address the issue as to whether your love output is worth it. For me, it hasn’t always been. It’s been more painful. And nothing about love should have pain. But everything about love should be kind.

Be kind to one another.

love each other.

like+ each other.

And listen to the words of Connor Chalfant. Love to love.