January 25, 2019

Umeboshi is extremely salty and sour, and thus loved and hated. In fact, we notice that anything at the extreme is either loved or hated, never forgettable. Some people will attempt to cherrypick love and avoid hate, but that won’t work because they are two sides of the same coin. Some avoid hate, thus never knowing love.

Perhaps it would make more sense to think of love and hate as different points on a waveform; love at the top extreme and hate at the bottom extreme. They are on the same continuous wave but at different points.

The advantage of experiencing the extremes of anything is that everything else in between can be interpolated or approximated. Staying neutral, avoiding extremes—which would be a straight line on a heart monitor—doesn’t allow you to extrapolate above or below.

Let’s say you are learning how to drive a car. If you push the car to the limits and get familiar with what happens at the extremes, everything in between becomes predictable.

By experiencing the extremes, you could get the best sense of a whole subject with the least amount of time. It’s preferable to do so while you are young so that you can effectively choose the best subject matter for you before digging deeper. Dive head first into everything that seems interesting, and try it at the extremes.

Painful, embarrassing, and shameful failures and mistakes are unavoidable when trying anything at the extremes, but these regrets are relatively minor when compared to the regrets of not trying because, in life, you cannot create opportunities at will.

Some will love you and some will hate you for your failures and mistakes, but other people are a lot more forgiving than you are about yourself because, ultimately, they don’t care about you as much as you do about yourself. You love and hate yourself the most.

#umeboshi #japanesefood #pickledplum #梅干し #nycfoodie #nycfood #loveandhate #extreme