🪲 Now I understand and I appreciate

Realizing the importance of taste

I run over to my mother. Stumbling over patches of grass and branches with the little legs of mine. Holding a mystery in my tiny hands. “Mama, Mama. Look what I found!” She turns, to me, welcomes me. “What is it sweety?” I open my hands. A large beetle shimmering green and yellow awkwardly trying to get to the edge of my hand. “Oh wow, look how colourful he is! So beautiful”, I hear her say. Exactly what I thought! It’s so cute. “Where did you find it? It’s so cute!” Now she is reading my mind. I point to the edge of the backyard. She always understands. She always appreciates what I show her. “Show me! I want to see where he lives.” We start walking over with my hand in hers. The little beetle crawling over it.

Growing up is when we first get a taste of what it means to feel loved. Our parents are our first points of contact with this obscure feeling. Like an infinite well, they overwhelm us with it. It expresses itself in many different ways that we may learn to understand someday.

Being the little helpless meatball that we are, we are always being taken care of. But this kind of love doesn’t register in our young minds much. Because as long as we can remember, we have been taken care of. It is normality.

But their love also expresses itself through their excitement for us. For everything we do. For everything we learn. Our parents become our world as we start to indulge in their affection. They closely follow our every step. They understand why we are excited about a beetle in the backyard. Knowing that we have never seen one before. They see the world through our eyes. Relate to our wonder. They understand and they appreciate. They make us feel loved. They are our first love.

When those two things come together, understanding and appreciation, a little bit of love is created. Feeling understood by another person and additionally appreciated by them means being accepted for who we are. Feeling seen. Feeling validated in being us. Because being an individual can be lonely. It is always solely us in our heads. Our parents are the first ones to show us that it is okay to be ourselves. They see us for who we are and appreciate us. And we will go on to be chasing this feeling for the rest of our lives. Chasing the feeling of being loved.

Growing older we are going through many different phases, searching for this feeling. As we experiment with an abundance of experiences, individual interests emerge. From art to culture, to any kind of activity. By exploring different facets of life, some things happen to stick to us. Tickle our interest. They seem to intuitively excite our brains to look deeper. And we will. Interests turn into exploration.

For a good friend of mine, this interest always has been electronic music. He has been consuming and making it for years. In the process, he has found certain DJs that just seemed to be the best in the space. Objectively most talented. The skillfulness that they produce, curate and mix tracks together seems to be the perfect way to do it. But one day he suddenly realised that what makes them so good, is not that they are objectively the best DJs. But that it is an expression of his taste. What he perceives as the best music is a subconscious choice he made along the way. It just intuitively seems to be most right. Most true. From a deep interest in a certain topic, taste arose.

Taste is our individuality manifested. A representation of our mind’s structure. Across all fields of life, no one will ever share the exact same taste in all dimensions. As no one will ever have the exact same mind.

Taste is expressed when reality meets our mind. It is the place of contact between the inside and the outside. Where the world meets our intuitive sense of it. When our mind experiences something that fits our taste our neural structures are being uniquely excited. Like the surface of a soap bubble reflecting the light in a myriad of individual shapes and colours. We shimmer. It stimulates us. We intuitively understand and appreciate it as it resonates within.

Taste first arises in our teenage years. When we start exploring different interests. At this time our relationship with our parents change. We don’t feel understood anymore. They don’t seem to get why I like this music. They don’t seem to get why I dress a certain way. I know they still appreciate me, but it doesn’t feel honest. “You don’t understand.” is an all too often mouthed sentence by a troubled mind going through puberty. Our changing tastes alienate us from the very people that know us best. It’s confusing.

Simultaneously we start looking for understanding and appreciation in others. But how can we be sure that these new people are honest? They don’t know me inside out like my parents. How can I trust their appreciation is not faked? Their understanding is not superficial?

Understanding without appreciation seeds doubts in ourselves. Similarly, appreciation without understanding fosters insecurities. If they truly understood, why don’t they appreciate? And how can one truly appreciate if one doesn’t understand? Would one still appreciate if they fully understood?

To make matters worse, understanding someone logically is not the same as understanding them emotionally. People may comprehend an explanation in its abstraction and limited precision. But to truly understand, one needs to experience it. Because the infinite precision of the analogue reality can only be comprehended intuitively. To be understood subconsciously. No consciously bound explanation can come close to it in its description of it. Only by having felt something similar before, one is able to fill in the blanks where the explanation ends. To be able to relate.

Here is where taste comes into play. Taste bridges the space between our minds. As an intuitive expression of understanding and appreciation, it is hard to fake. We can see if someone truly enjoys something. We can see it in their eyes. Hitting a certain spot in their mind one is just too familiar with. They just get it. No explanation needed. Minds relating to each other. Being connected.

With someone having the same taste we can trust in their intuitive understanding and appreciation for a part of reality. And with tastes defining our individuality, we can trust their intuitive understanding and appreciation for a part of us. It gives us a new feeling of being accepted. It gives us a new feeling of being loved.

This shared understanding and appreciation can be observed standing amidst a crowd of people at a concert. One just needs to look at the next friend or stranger to get a glimpse of it in action.

Their eyes lighting up. Synced movements. Smiles. People appreciating a moment. In that instance of reality, everyone there shares the same intuitive understanding. Some part of everyone’s neural network is firing in synchronicity. In those moments we feel like we belong. We feel seen. Because we know that everyone right then and there understands why this is awesome. Everyone is carrying a part of us in their mind at that moment. Even physiologically, a reflection of our mind, of our neural expression, being active in someone else. Our taste manifested. The most honest expression of understanding. We have arrived at a place where other people share an appreciation with us. For that music. For that moment. It is a fraction of shared love.

And if we are lucky, at some point we will meet a stranger who is just too similar to us. Someone whose mind seems to be too closely wired like ours. Someone whose taste overlaps on countless dimensions. We will fall in love with their mind. Because we see ourselves in them. What sounds like a self-absorbed perspective is a bidirectional reality. Their mind is also in yours. They are neurologically inside you. And they love what they see. Because it is themself. As they understand and appreciate themselves, they now do you.

Small gestures will become laden with meaning. A shy whisper in an intimate moment can speak louder than any sound ever issued. “I can’t have you close enough”. Revealing the depth of understanding. One is inside of the other’s mind. While carrying the other person within oneself. The remaining manifestation in physical reality feeling like the last unnecessary barrier. Minds synchronised.

I recently got surprised by this realisation. Watching a complete rainbow over the horizon with friends and strangers. Where others enjoyed it for a short moment, I was mesmerised for a little eternity. I couldn’t stop looking at it. It managed to completely silence my mind with its awe-inspiring evolution of colours. Fading in and out of intensity. It just perfectly hit the spot - my love for nature’s intricacies.

But then a thought struck me like lightning. ‘I wish she would be here right now. She would get it.’ She would see and feel it like I do. She would understand and appreciate. At that moment I realised that this is it. This is what it’s about. To love is to understand and appreciate reality the same way. Because reality is a subjective experience. It is our world inside of us. And once someone honestly and intuitively understands and appreciates our world, we become part of them. It becomes my world inside of you. It becomes your world inside of me.

Coming full circle from being fully understood and appreciated by one’s parents, to being alienated in one’s individuality. Going out into the world searching for love. To come back and find it in the very thing that alienated us in the first place. To not be lonely is to develop taste. To lean into what excites you. It is the foundation to find people who can truly understand and appreciate you. Who are looking at the world with the same insanity in their eyes.

Nobody will love you like your mother. But someone will love you like themselves.