The Flavor will Come
(A bit sleepy, hence slightly sloppy writing, sorry)
One of the weirder meals I ate in Korea was at this eerily quiet rice soup store.
It was a tiny rice soup store in the Michelin guide, and inside it only had enough room for a stainless steel bar that sat 7 people. We got there 30 minutes early and waited in line for the tiny number of seats.
The entire place had a brutalist concrete building vibe, and the menu selection was limited, and the waiters and chefs barely spoke, we just pointed to their main offering (pork soup with rice), they nodded and proceeded to make the dish in what seemed like absolute silence. Like the staff and the other guests, I also didn't speak at all.
— That dish stood out to me because up till now i've never seen pork broth this clear. It didn't feel like it had oil in it, and it feels like you can really see deep into the soup.
I felt pretty disappointed when I started on the dish, it didn't have any flavoring – felt like it was just thin-sliced pork. Over the course of the meal though, for some reason I felt myself focusing on the flavor of this dish more intensely than most of the meals I've had before. The lack of distractions – both in the external environment and the broth itself, made me want to seek more experiences, the and only stimuli with enough depth to dive into was the pork itself. And so because the pork was made so simply, it made me appreciate the natural flavor of pork much more.
To be honest, I didn't think the meal was in my top 3 in the trip when I left that store. However, in the months after the trip, I find myself thinking to that meal, and the headspace that it invoked in me, often.
It's actually the case that everything we encounter in life produces a lingering sensation. It's subtle but rich in variety, much like the sensation that food gives us. This is why we call the ability to appreciate it “taste”. And in the past few days, I found myself noticing the relationship between the calmness I feel at the moment and how deeply I can dive into the flavor of the moment.
— The place I notice this the most, I think, are in social interactions.
My mom is an extremely social person while my dad is a super antisocial one. I think in some ways, my tendency gravitates towards that of my dad's. Things that other people pick up socially seem to take just a smidgen longer for me to pick up, and I sometimes wished that I was someone who naturally had a lot of charisma.
Something I noticed though, is that just by being practicing being grounded in the moment, I'm able to detect more nuances in social interactions now. A focused but relaxed mind naturally hones itself for depth. And just like how the blank environment at the rice place made me observe the taste of everyday pork at a deeper level, I find myself more aware of how distracted I am at the moment, and how I'm able to understand things much deeper when I approach it with a calm mind.
And all that was because of a bowl of some pork broth rice.
— Categorized under: #psychology, #interactions, #meditation