I came across this thing called the black coffee theory a while back and it’s been stuck in my head since. Basically, 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 focused on the thing you didn’t want that it became the only thing on the table.
If you only know what you don’t want but never figure out what you actually want, you’re gonna end up with the thing you were trying to avoid.
There’s this verse in the Quran, 2:216, that I’ve known for a long time but didn’t really get 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 knowing it in your head and actually living through it are completely different things.
And honestly, my life keeps proving both of these right, 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. Now? I genuinely love it. Soto for breakfast is one of my favorite things. The thing I kept running from became the thing I actually look forward to. lol.
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 2:216 actually clicked for me. Not as a verse I can recite, but as something I’ve lived through more than once without realizing it.
I don’t think everything bad has some hidden purpose. 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 spend so much energy running from the stuff we don’t want that we never stop to figure out what we do want.
And then the barista just gives you the black coffee anyway.