When I was 19 I had been to London for 5 days. I remember I liked the city, the people and the smell among the streets, but one thing remained impressed: the taste of a special tea that a young woman offered me. That tea tasted like apricot, chamomile, peace and sweetness, I loved it! For years I had been looking everywhere for the same brand, taste and emotion that tea transmitted me, in those few seconds in the city of London.
Incredibly, one day I was walking around in Trento and looking at the store windows of a small delicacy shop, I noticed something: that was my London tea, the tea I had been looking for so long, just 10 years later. I didn't have to think about it too much, I entered the place and bought the tea, end of story.
Excited, I came home looking forward to reproduce that taste, emotion and big revelation that very tea had gave me many years before. I boiled the water, added the product and waited. The smell was already alarming: was that really the tea I tasted in London? The ingredients were the same, so the brand. I drank it, kept it in my mouth for a while, looking like an old sommelier. The taste was nauseating. It was too sweet, too intense, simply not my kind. Then I remembered: that was the taste, but I was different, and yet I liked it back then. This episode made me thought a lot about the relativity of things based on age.
Is it possible that what it looks, tastes and feels great when you're 20, it's all different when you grow up? I have always thought that one thing, you love it or you hate it, forever. But now I am not so sure anymore. What if everything I thought and experienced, it was only the result of the perception I felt on that particular moment of my life? Do I have to re dimension everything I remember? Was I only too enthusiastic because I was younger?
These thoughts scared me. All the good and bad things I remember probably are only what I was when I stored that memory. I had the chance to rethink about my first boss, my first love, my spiritual view and I explored these memories only finding out that all I thought to be fantastic or horrible were neither. Things are not simply so extreme as I remembered them. I don't think I am just wiser, I rather believe that experiences are such only when you have the time to re-explore them after a couple of years and visit them as an external viewer. Of course it's no easy to admit I had been wrong most of time, or that I exaggerated some of those perceptions, but in the end I feel like this kind of analysis is going to help me control my ups and downs, to overreact less and reflect a little bit more before making life changing decisions.
I am glad I found that tea, I am glad I was so sweet and exaggerated, I am glad I was just young.
