An essay from Smells Like Monday by Chad Schomber
It started like most mornings. Not with a bang. With a murmur. The kind of low, creaking groan that lives in old floorboards and middle-aged knees. I shuffled into the kitchen on autopilot. The house still held the chill of the night. Everything was quiet, except for the soft, wheezing hum of the fridge. Like it was tired of doing its job.
I reached for the coffee pot. Rinsed it. Poured water to the 12-cup line like always. Then I grabbed a filter from the crumpled pack, dropped it into the basket, and spooned in the grounds. Three scoops. Level. Familiar. Nothing heroic.
But when I hit the switch, the day hiccupped.
The filter had folded inward.
It collapsed like a paper lung, surrendering to the weight of wet grounds and gravity. What should have been a simple drip turned into a slow, bitter mudslide. Coffee overflowed the basket. Brown sludge pooled on the hot plate. The smell was off. Burnt, sour. Like regret.
I stared at it too long. Longer than it deserved.
That paper crease, that slight sag of fiber and time, had somehow chosen today to give up. And in doing so, made a small mess. Just big enough to notice. Just indistinct enough to seem unimportant. But not to me.
Not today.
Because that folded filter wasn’t just a filter. It was a signal. A tiny white flag waving from the trenches of my morning routine. It whispered what I already suspected: today might not go smoothly.
That’s the thing about small failures. They don’t announce themselves. They don’t throw tantrums or leave bruises. They just show up early, humble and unremarkable, and start tugging at the loose threads.
You try to ignore them. You wipe up the mess, rinse out the carafe, start over. But by then, something’s shifted. A sliver of attention has gone missing. Your rhythm’s off by half a beat. You butter the bacon instead of the toast. You button your shirt wrong and don’t notice until after the meeting. You reach for the keys that aren’t in your pocket. You realize you're already running late, and now the day is driving you.
It’s never just the coffee filter.
It’s the way one small thing demands more energy than it’s worth, like a door that only sticks when your hands are full. You tell yourself it’s no big deal. And technically, it isn’t. But these tiny inefficiencies have sharp edges. They scrape away at your patience, make you forget what you were doing, or why you even got out of bed.
And the worst part is how invisible it all looks from the outside.
If you told someone you were thrown off by a coffee filter, they’d laugh. Or nod politely. Or remind you to just take a deep breath. But they weren’t there. They didn’t see the grounds dripping down the counter, the way the light hit the stain like a spotlight. They didn’t feel the tight pinch behind your eyes, the kind that says this isn't about coffee at all.
It’s about friction. Quiet resistance. The way the world sometimes leans against you just enough to matter.
We build our days on rituals. The turn of a knob. The click of a switch. The smell of something warm and predictable. When those break down, even for a second, it leaves a hairline crack in the foundation. Small. But it echoes.
And maybe, by noon, you’ve forgotten all about it. Maybe you get your footing back. Maybe the second pot brews just fine. But that first failure? It set the tone. It whispered to the part of your brain that keeps score: Be careful today. Things fall apart.
Not catastrophically. Not with fireworks. Just enough to remind you that control is always temporary.
So the next time the coffee filter folds in on itself like a tired little ghost, don’t ignore it. Look it in the eye. Acknowledge the omen.
Then pour a cup anyway. Even if it tastes like cardboard.
The world doesn't stop for small failures. But it does start with them.