Sometimes I over-sugar my morning coffee. I wonder why.

I know better. I don’t want to. Coffee over-sugared becomes too sweet to enjoy (though whither this sense of over-sweet is likewise mysterious). Inattention? Yes – but what’s inattention but a word? It’s not that I’m preoccupied with other matters in the predawn. I don’t even want to be up. But Henry’s a daylight enthusiast. Gray light past window shade and he’s up and at ‘em. My mother was that way too. Crack of dawn and there she’d be in my doorway: “Are you going to spend all day in bed?”

I know exactly how to sugar my coffee the way I like it – half a teaspoon and that’s it! It irks me when I over-sugar. Over-sugared coffee displeases – I may quit my cup after a few sips. No absent-minded professor or dreamy poet excuses – I know how to do this, it’s not hard. I discern no upside for my negligence, no secret advantage. I am not “getting away with” anything, asserting my autonomy by defiance. I’m just screwing up – not once, but frequently, maybe several times a month.

Any theories?

Forget about it, you may say, preserve your brain for more consequential cogitations. Overthink each instant and you’ll never get through your day.

That’s true. To pondering, like any human activity, the Goldilocks caution applies: so far and no farther, enough is enough. Remember Hans Look-in-the-Air in Slovenly Peter, who drowned in the ditch from looking at the stars.

I am making too much of this inadvertence, granted. Only questions, once posed, can’t be brushed aside like cobwebs. They may linger, taunting. “You fancy yourself a thinker and you can’t figure this out? Hah!”

Are humans the only animal that makes trouble for itself?

Other creatures injure themselves. Moths fly into flames, salmon die spawning, dogs eat stuff that sickens. Life means getting into scrapes. But only humans make trouble in pursuit of no evident benefit. We stab ourselves, starve ourselves, gnaw our nails to the quick, wear hairshirts – for crazy reasons or none at all – frustrating ourselves with non-compliance to our own sensible guidance. How can a being so smart be so stupid?

Blame our brains. If we were stupider, we’d behave less stupidly. But humans have imagined ourselves into a multiplicity of selves incessantly at odds. “Vorrei e non vorrei,” we sigh at temptations, I want to and I don’t, so that our every choice is, to some degree, a mistake. The guy standing at the kitchen counter while his coffee heats is not one but a congeries – breakfast preparer, missive planner, lollygagger gazing at the deer grazing the field, and others – whose preferences compete. I want to get my coffee right – it annoys me not to (q.e.d.) – but face it, coffee-making is boring, so my impatient brain slips its traces to frolic elsewhere. Absent-minded means many-minded. And when we wake to our dereliction, we want to punish ourselves. Simple enough to pour myself a fresh cup suitably sweetened, but instead I condemn myself to this cup, which now sits tepid at my elbow after a few grouchy sips while, in a spirit of self-correction, I try wrangling my coffee mess into a missive, the moral of which – but this sentence is getting too long…

The moral of our vignette is familiar: life is what we make of it, so make the most. If you don’t get what you want, want what you get. Or as Hamlet puts it, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Imagine yourself to heaven and you’re halfway there.