A spiritual evaluation on personal taste and some context on it.
“What was Alexander the Great’s favorite wine?”
Nobody really knows, nobody really cares. “Tastes” are things you have or acquire in this life to help give it flavour. Maybe you’ll meet someone with similar or compatible tastes, and that can be the bedrock for a good friendship, or something more, even. But even then, It can be trivial or minute or even hindering to an interesting relationship or discussion.
I won’t delve into this too much, but someone whose opinion really does matter is a critic. Love them or hate them. The ones who are worth listening to or reading aren’t even the most eloquent or perceptive. I find, like all things in life’s marketplace, people go to them for a specific thing. In this case, that “thing” is the person’s cocky opinion.
A good critic is someone who knows exactly what they like, and can possibly explain quite well with a paragraph or two, or a feature, and/or a score out of ten (or percentage), that brashly shows the reader how much they enjoyed it. If you know what that critic really LIKES, usually, the more helpful they are. Narrow-mindedness is a virtue reserved for well-known media critics.
I’m not a great critic still, because my mind is way too open and my opinion on music changes like the months and seasons. I can tell you, with a bit of a struggle, and disregard for refinement, what I like or don’t, and why.
“So what do I like, and why?“
I can’t tell you exactly. Music is love. Emotion. Energy in motion. It’s always moving and changing and shifting and sifting. I have comfort zones that get stuffy and i need a breather from. I’ll tell you that. Those comfort zones are like home, to me.
I only get solid, strong opinions when i press pause for a while on my ocean of thoughts, and the storm above them is calm enough to take a journey safely, and return to shore, intact.
Then I can report on how I found the journey. With whats going on with the mystery of life, my relationship with the arts, and the limitation of words amidst the nature of life and things
I do however, have a basic grasp on what may be to be live and think this way, as myself. Like a kid with a cellphone, and a basic understanding of the settings on it. I had a group discussion today and brought up this idea; spending too much time in your head, and what you do when you are there, can be like spending too long customizing the settings on a computer. Either you’ll make it more suitable for your own specific, personal use, or banjax it, or a bit of both.
It’s better to crack on with business, then, and use the mind and body how they ought to be used. There’s plenty of examples, good and bad, of people doing both.
In other words, i think it’s healthy to pull a bit of knowledge of tradition into your mind and see what’s worked and what has not throughout history. (But, don’t glue your head to that topic too long if you’re not prepared, is my advice)
Your taste in music, literature, art, film etc is good. It shows you engage with life with some form of zeal. I find it near impossible to hold decent conversations with people talking about very little but themselves and their opinions on what they like or don’t. And I’m not talking about small-talk either, which is a universe or practice in and of itself, that’s always struck me as more of a useful skill for those “into it”.
All these things, records, streams, writings or opinions, they’re all really just accessory. That’s the big picture. So enjoy what you enjoy, try and avoid little things you don’t. All the feelings shall drop away, drift off and decay, when we reach or final rest and pass away.
What you like, what you are “into“, may speak volumes sometimes what kind of person you are or what your ideals are, but they are certainly not you, and are poor excuses of describing what you are, really, no matter how closely they look or seem to be. They are static relics. We are living souls.
My discoveries through heavy listening both in and out of my comfort zone pull the same conclusion from the depths, time and time again. Becoming clearer and clearer like a radio set. I don’t know where the term formed, but I suppose it got jostled there by delving, disoriented into new turf, and just as it started, or began to seem “boring” as if by the way parables form, I realized in a real sense (as if with a Zen Koan): “I have literally no choice but to live my best life, truly, as best I can until death takes me himself.”
I have trouble escaping the notion that this insight that formed, and is echoed in these words, are, and should be, of gratuitous help to remember &hold on to.
With peace & love,
The Humble Rock Dove
The Humble Rock Dove 