There’s this thing called the black coffee theory that I keep thinking about. The idea is simple: imagine you walk up to a barista and you have no idea what you want, but you know for sure you don’t want black coffee. “Anything but black coffee,” you say. But by the time the barista gets to the machine, the only thing stuck in their head is “black coffee,” and that’s exactly what you get. Not because you asked for it, but because you were so fixated on the thing you didn’t want that it became the only thing on the table.
The point is, if you only know what you don’t want but never figure out what you actually want, you’re probably gonna end up with the thing you were trying to avoid. Because that’s the only thing you focused on.
There’s this verse in the Quran, Al-Baqarah 216, that I’ve known for a long time but didn’t really understand until recently. It roughly translates to: “Perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you, and perhaps you love a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah knows, while you know not.”
I’ve heard it a million times in Friday sermons, seen it on those Instagram posts with the aesthetic backgrounds, nodded along like I totally got it. But honestly, knowing it in your head and actually living through it are completely different things.
And I think my life has been a running example of both the black coffee theory and that verse playing out at the same time, sometimes in the smallest, dumbest ways.
Like soto. I used to really, really avoid eating soto in the morning. I don’t even remember why exactly, maybe it felt too heavy, or I just wasn’t a morning soup person, or whatever excuse I had. For the longest time I’d see people ordering soto for breakfast and think “how do you guys do this so early.” I actively avoided it the way some people avoid phone calls. But somehow, life kept putting soto in front of me in the morning. Food stalls that only served soto, friends who insisted on going there, situations where there was literally nothing else to eat. And at some point I gave in, and now? I genuinely love it. Soto for breakfast is one of my favorite things now. The thing I kept running from became the thing I actually look forward to. Kinda funny how that works.
And it’s not just food. I have an Industrial Engineering degree, and the one thing I really tried to avoid from that major was ergonomics. I wanted the operations and tech stuff, not workplace design and body posture analysis. But my work and life now? It keeps crossing paths with ergonomics. It keeps showing up no matter how hard I try to dodge it, and the annoying part is that it actually turned out to be useful. All those classes I tried to sleep through ended up mattering way more than I expected.
That’s when Al-Baqarah 216 stopped being just a verse I knew and became something I actually felt. The things I kept avoiding turned out to be good for me, and I just couldn’t see it at the time.
I’m not gonna sit here and say every bad thing that happens has some beautiful hidden purpose. That’s too neat, and life is way messier than that. But I do think we’re pretty terrible at knowing what’s actually good for us in the moment. We fixate on what we don’t want, we run from the bitter stuff, and sometimes that running is exactly what keeps bringing it back to us.
Maybe the move is to stop telling the barista what you don’t want. And maybe, just maybe, trust that the black coffee you’ve been avoiding might actually be exactly what you needed.