Four Flavors of Coffee

There’s a tendency to swallow the whole thing at once.

Peanut butter and jelly isn’t just peanut butter and jelly. It’s the sandwich—the bread, the peanut butter, the jelly—all together in one bite. That’s different from tasting the jelly by itself and then the peanut butter afterward.

Same with a cookie dipped in milk. If you dip it long enough so the cookie is just about to fall apart, the flavor changes. It’s not cookie plus milk anymore. It’s something new.

My grandson once insisted that a cheeseburger is not just a hamburger with cheese on top. A cheeseburger is a cheeseburger—the bun, the pickles, the onions, the lettuce, the tomato, the ketchup or mayonnaise. All of it together makes something that has its own identity.

We do the same thing with feelings.

We say, “I feel good,” and leave it at that. One big peanut-butter-and-jelly word.

But this morning when I sat down to meditate, I wondered what was inside that sandwich. From the Buddhist side of things there are four flavors: joy, happiness, rapture, and bliss. Different notes in the same chord.

Just as I was about to sit with that, the phone rang.

Emergency service required—not the dentist, not the fire department, but apparently the garage-door and backyard-gate specialist. My son couldn’t get the garage door to close.

So off I went.

Turned out to be a simple problem. A small adjustment and the door rolled down like it was supposed to. Nothing heroic. But driving back down the hill I noticed something: the morning had started with a small good deed.

That reminded me of my old Boy Scout motto—do a good turn daily.

And there it was again, the different flavors.

A little joy in solving the puzzle.
A quiet happiness knowing I’d helped.
A touch of rapture, that quick spark when things suddenly work.
And then bliss, the calm that settles in afterward when everything is just… fine.

By the time I got home, the meditation had already happened.

So I went into the kitchen and made a cup of coffee, wondering which flavor of feeling would show up in the first sip.