Taste, a Living Autopsy
What I uncovered while following the trail Taste left across a lifetime of movement
When we’re feeling lost or stuck, it can be especially tempting to look back on the lives we’ve led and wonder if all we’ve really ever gotten good at is extracting ourselves from the places we’ve never really belonged.
These fears and doubts, these seasons of life are, by design, inevitable. While they can strike unannounced and linger much too long, I am convinced they play a catalytic role in our becoming.
When we are trapped inside such a precarious place, this land of emotional limbo can make our journey, both through and out, feel more like a reactive escape route than a manicured path toward something bigger and more meaningful.
Movement here feels like traipsing, dodging, meandering, trudging. Not surprisingly, we get so overwhelmed just moving on that we don’t always have the time or energy left to move forward and toward what is meant for us versus strictly away from what isn’t.
When I think about the transformative power of travel, its radicalization of taste and its deliciously diverting disruption of my own life, I can't help but obsess over why I feel so affected by that word, toward.
How different our journeys unfold when we move toward what our minds, bodies, souls and guts know is good for us. When asked to move in this direction, these internal bearings perk up, work together and cook up momentum and progress. Decidedly different, movement here feels like shedding, floating, galloping, ascending.
I was twenty-nine years old when I graduated from business school. At the time, business school was the only reasonable (read: socially acceptable) escape from a life I knew was no longer aligned with my values and ambition. I had the gumption to go. But I did not have the foresight to figure out what for and why.
And so, I spent the next sixteen years moving without a rudder until my two compulsions – Travel and Taste – collided. During this spell, I wasn’t without enterprise. I was without purpose. I wasn’t unhappy. I was under-stimulated and unfulfilled. I had goals and dreams but no destiny to ascribe them to, just the next performance review and promotion.
I was blindly racing to the top of a corporate ladder for no other reason than it was the one right in front of me. Each time, I assumed the next rung up had to be the rewarding rung, the one where it suddenly all clicked. But it never was. As my resume grew, I kept consuming, clawing and capitulating. I also kept suppressing my inner voice, contorting myself year after year into something, someone, I was never meant to be.
But then travel nudged me. Trip by trip, toward the thesis my life had been missing.
Taste.
Over the years, Taste first appeared as breadcrumb and cue, as poke this way and jab that way, then as reappraisal, art and finally gateway to calling.
It chose to accumulate, not assault, to infiltrate, not invade. Its approach would be resoundingly successful. When it was time, when I was ready, Taste was waiting, having already manifested itself unassumingly inside of me.
Though it never appeared initially as a centralizing force or lightning rod, Taste had been there, somewhere, all along, in brilliant flashes of courage and confidence.
There was that first courageous domino-effect bite of steak tartare in the South of France and then bite after bite in every country visited thereafter.
There were anchovies tentatively tried and conquered in Positano only to be ordered without hesitation years later in Spain, Poland and New Zealand. I even had preferred preparations: in-oil, as paste or grilled fresh. Any and all of these were always welcome. Yes please.
There were the first few times uni (sea urchin) made it into the rotation in Tokyo and Hong Kong until it became a confident go-to favorite in my lineup back home.
There were mesmerizing chef counters, mixologists, tasting menus, half-portions and too many life-redirecting collisions and coincidences to count and catalog.
Each in its own right, proof that following this sense and frequency, this surfacing compass, would lead me to the formative and sublime. Taste had been generously clearing air and space so I could reconnect with my inner voice, and unbunch what living out of alignment had so tangled and scrunched up. It wasn’t just showing me, it was readying me.
When life swiftly and fatefully knocked me off that ladder, off my perch of indiscriminate, comfortable self-assurance, I see now that I was being given a second chance to anchor my life around my one true calling and purpose. I was back on level ground with just the right vantage point from which to see who I was without all the trappings and trimmings of the career I had conveniently cloaked myself in.
This time, I would be sure to ask for what and why.
One of the bigger revelations struck around the absurdly familiar just as the Kansas City Chiefs were losing to the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl 59. Given my life's circumstances, I had chosen not to watch the game on TV. Super Bowl LIX was the first one in a decade I wouldn't be attending in person for work. So, I did what I had learned to do. I turned to Taste. I booked omakase at Mako in Chicago and marveled at what I ultimately uncovered sipping sake and nibbling on nigiri.
At some point that evening, it hit me. My favorite part of those games, hands down, was the glitzy tailgate parties the NFL threw pre-game for sponsors, teams and VIP guests. There inside white tents on white tablecloths sat small plates of the host city's better bites and sips. By my ninth Super Bowl, I had developed my own mental playbook to maximize my pre-game taste and time.
As I write this, I still feel that empty pit in my stomach like it's the end of summer vacation, when we had to put our forks and glasses down and go in for what we supposedly came for.
The game.
It was no surprise or coincidence then that I had turned to Taste for comfort and inspiration as I was deciding at forty-five years old what should come next. What started as a defiant lunch to prove to myself that life would go on and go on splendidly at that became an unmistakable signal months later that Taste was, in fact, my lifeblood and future. My compass.
The more I traveled in the months after that Roscioli lunch in Rome, and the life-changing one that followed the next day in Orvieto, the more Taste made itself known to me. It kept appearing as the answer to how, what for and where I traveled; as the source and outlet for my creative energy; as the transmission of my unique love language between colleagues, friends and family.
To the ongoing delight of my tastebuds, Taste continued during this stretch of time to lead me toward new flavors, dishes and pure unadulterated joy. Taste also led me back to questions I knew I had to get right this time: what for and why?
Why am I here? What is my calling? What is my purpose?
Even after unearthing both calling and purpose last year, Taste continued its friendly and productive agitation. It pressed further and deeper.
What followed felt like a self-reflexive paradox that I was living and solving at once as life hurried along. A complex physics problem, an arc within an arc. Not only could I sense the impact of Taste in real time. The more I wrote about it – and wrote closer to my center and self – the more I sensed its transformative effect stretched beyond every initial encounter.
The reflections that writing 66 Tesseras triggered had made it abundantly clear that Taste had become so much more than just navigator, ally and muse. Each time I autopsied a destination, I met Taste, the mediator, the historian and the provocateur.
So many times, since inviting it into my orbit, Taste seems to mysteriously know before I do which role I need it to play. When I peer back into trips like Mallorca, where Taste in its usual delectable form was absent, I see a force more aggressively encouraging change and realignment.
I curiously couldn’t remember a single bite I ate in Mallorca, one of my favorite food regions in the world. Here, Taste had a more significant ask to negotiate. While I didn’t see it then, I understood it later. The more I moved away from what moved me, the more lost and disillusioned I became. What should have been an obvious sign to course correct in Mallorca became instead an SOS I’d send myself, not to be decoded for another three years. Once it was, the message was crystal clear. Always, always know your true north.
Taste has become such an intrinsic part of who I am in motion that I wonder lately if it is less a compass guiding me through some outside force than my own unfiltered inner voice finally freed and followed. Whether it musters its power from within or from beyond, Taste, as always, will lead me forward and toward meaning and matter.
