A philosophy of whisky
Often , we forget the magic of the world in every day objects, we do not contemplate just how absolutely miraculous everyday things are. As Henry Miller once said ”The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” It is this kind of wonder , for things we take for granted , that gives children their air of a zest for life. As we grow older, the world is no longer wondrous to us, and the tiny miracles that surround us lose focus, and eventually become non existent to our conscious minds.
As an adult though, most of the time we are forced to ignore all of the tiny miracles and enchanting worlds that surround us , if we didn’t we would likely become hermits and be deemed mad by the rest of the outside world.Another challenge facing anybody who wishes to see wonder everywhere they look, is that sometimes we get caught up in the moment , in the emotion of everyday life, we have trained very long and very hard to ignore the simple wonders , so we need to train very long and very hard to get out of that habit.
Sen no Rikyu proposed using the tea ceremony to promote Wabi-sabi (a world view centred on the acceptance of transience and imperfection), though I would also imagine that the appreciation of the fine points of the tea itself could exercise our mind into forming the habit of appreciating things for what they are.
I do not have a Japanese tea set, nor do I have a garden hut in which to sit and drink tea. I do however partake in something interestingly ceremonial though , and luckily , it’s something that is completely acceptable in western society; the hobby of whisky collecting. More specifically , whisky tasting and the taking of notes.
The tasting notes , and more specifically, the scoring are the most important bit of linking whisky tasting to the tea ceremony. This idea came to me the day that I scored a whisky 88/100 (The Glenlivet 12), a score two points above a whisky I would much rather prefer drinking if given a choice between the two (Highland Park 12). By breaking down my experience , I found that the thing I preferred was not necessarily the thing that was the most interesting.
I found it very easy to draw a link between this conclusion in whisky tasting and a truth about daily life; sometimes things can be a little more interesting and more fulfilling when things don’t always go the way we want them. Sometimes we should sit back and just appreciate how interesting our lives really are.Soon I found that this habit of appreciating tastes I didn’t necessarily prefer started extending to food as well, and I found that the eating of good food would become good food for the mind as well, expanding my appreciation for the simple wonders of life in general.
Making a habit/ceremony/ritual of appreciation naturally expands into the other aspects of life. The ancient east had the tea ceremony , and I would argue to the scorn of Nietzsche that we have whisky tasting.
