little beautiful things
on taste, resonance and accumulation
I’ve been wanting to write about taste for a while, and yet the right moment has continued to elude me. This problem itself may be a function of my current relationship to my taste: which is, I know what I like, clearly, strongly, and confidently. So much so that I keep getting fixated on new things, and then I am much too gloriously preoccupied with all of those beautiful new things to write this piece about taste :). As my friend recently said to me: too much signal eventually becomes its own type of noise.
I have never felt as in touch with my own sense of resonance—my sense of what I do and do not like—as I do lately. The light side of this is that my life is starting to look more like me every day. I can see myself expressed in everything around me: in what I say, do, think, wear, acquire. I can see my growth and evolution painted all over my life. It’s comforting to see who you are and who you’re becoming unfolding live, expressed consciously your life—in its aesthetics, in your choices, in your people. Everything starts to tell the Story of You: from the scent you wear, to the work you do, to the book you walk around with, to the people you spend time with, to the places you go out of your way to see, to what you laugh at, to what you choose to create (and consume). It feels good to be in touch with what makes you feel like yourself.
And the shadow of having such clear, vibrant taste is that you are so confident that you truly want the things that you resonate with that it can be easy to accumulate things rapidly, potentially even excessively. Conversely, when you’re in a phase where your taste doesn’t feel as clear to you, where your resonance is more in flux, where you are confused about who you are and by extension: what you like, it can be easy to bypass opportunities for self-expression, because you’re not exactly sure what ‘self’ you want to express in that moment. You are in flux; and to a degree, your external life can reflect that. But as your sense of self becomes clearer, crisper, more alive, more defined, the things that *match* your crystallizing sense of self come into greater focus. You can understand and notice what makes you feel like you—a feeling you are already deeply, abundantly familiar with internally. The task then is to simply externalize with the tangible what you have come to know internally through the intangible.
When your taste comes into focus, it is essential to trust it. To dwell deeply in it. To let it come alive inside of you, and outside of you. To pursue and explore the things you deeply resonate with. I believe that taste is the fundamental unit of self-trust. When you know what you like and what you are pulled to, you begin to get a clearer image of yourself; and you start to show up more clearly, more honestly to the world. Trusting your taste helps you feel more like yourself, it reminds you that you have an opinion, and it gives you the opportunity to tell the world what that opinion is. You start to feel the ways in which your sense of self has updated; you feel the texture of your energy expressed in objects, in the things you are drawn to. And you lean into it because it is fun to adorn your life with what feels uniquely resonant now.
This is a natural cycle that follows any metamorphosis period—one where you crawled in as a caterpillar, unsure of yourself, confused and itchy for change, where your skin felt too tight and you sensed you were on the cusp of becoming something new. In that stage when nothing was calling to you, perhaps you felt a low tendency towards acquiring anything as an expression of yourself. Perhaps you wanted to be alone, inwards—metaphysically raw, naked, unadorned. But on the other side of that experience is a rebirth, an emergence as a butterfly with a deep inner knowing, and a willingness to be seen. A willingness to adorn your life with the beauty that uniquely resonates with you.
Your taste follows you through this natural cycle. You emerge, ready to pollinate the world, fly around, find the flowers you like, rest on them, then flutter elsewhere, letting your beauty be visible, alive and sensed by those around you.
I felt this metaphor viscerally recently, as I travelled to Europe and noticed my sense of resonance come through clearer and louder than it ever has. I could feel and detect what I desired, what I wanted, what I liked, what was me powerfully clearly. I had fluttered away in full-butterfly-expression and knew exactly what was beautiful to me and how to move towards it. I was operating in full self-trust, an embodied way of being I’ve only just started to truly experience for the first time.