I think life is best experienced through its contrasts.
This is really evident in how we enjoy food. Having too many salty ingredients in a meal is redundant and overpowering. Dishes with contrasting flavors, meanwhile, are what we tend to enjoy.
For example, when you take a bite of sushi, you get the fresh flavor of the salmon, the saltiness of the soy sauce, and the spicy heat from the wasabi. By sheer juxtaposition, those individual flavors reinforce each other, and you’re able to experience each flavor more fully. In a way, the smooth flavor of the salmon heightens the heat of the wasabi through contrast.
I’d argue that, in general, life is best experienced through these contrasts.
Sadly though, we get caught up in the day-to-day routine too often. You might be a software engineer living a very comfortable life in downtown San Francisco, walking distance from world-class restaurants and busy bars. But, as the years pass, you’ll have done most of the things worth doing once, if not twice.
While many of your experiences previously left you shaking your head smiling in disbelief, you’re now rarely surprised by much of anything that you do.
The natural answer to this problem is to add more contrasting experiences to your life. If you’re in San Francisco, try living in New York for a month! Or, work from Mexico for a few weeks! Given how different these places are from San Francisco, you’ll be able to appreciate the differences in culture and lifestyle.
But not everyone can just jet-set to different parts of the globe. Some of us have families and not all of us work from home. Also, I don’t think traveling every other weekend is a sustainable way of living in general.
I actually think that the best place to find contrasts is in the mundane. On that daily walk to the gym, maybe I should pay more attention to how lively the birds chirp in the summertime.
I read this one Raymond Carver short story that illustrated really well how we can appreciate contrasts in our day-to-day.
In Carver’s story, there’s a woman in her 60s reflecting on her marriage with a friend. She talks about how her husband loves to tell this one funny story from his childhood. Over the course of their marriage, she has heard him tell the same story dozens of times to a variety of listeners.
Each time he tells the story, she notices the little bits of the story that change: the parts truncated, the pieces embellished, and the portions left out altogether. She notices how even though his gestures haven’t changed at all over the years, the wrinkles on his forehead are more lined than ever.
She notices the little contrasts and caresses them as if she were feeling the grooves on a small river stone.
And she smiles.