The Role of Reflection: Turning Experience into Lasting Taste
Reflection is the breathing room where the loose data of exploratory tasting and the daring leaps of experimentation get integrated and interpreted. It’s the dimension where, without it, the process of developing your tastes can stop at the punctual, often amazing, discrete events that it comprises, but not quite hang together into the kind of powerful arc of personal style that comes from living in harmony with your tastes. So by stopping to write down your thoughts in a notebook, to discuss your impressions with someone, or simply to sit with a decision you’ve just made, you can catch up and ask some questions of it. Like, why did I like that so much? What was the quality of the feeling that lingered once the rush of discovering it was over? How does this new like relate to what I’ve liked before? These aren’t analytic, disapproving questions, but reflective, approving questions.
That’s where reflection comes in, as a way to understand how moments relate to each other after the fact. The item that felt too bold in the moment becomes an odd one out that subtly interferes with the flow we’re creating, and the color we’ve been rejecting is suddenly a presence in a few things we like that represents a theme that wasn’t yet conscious to us. As we go back and look at those moments again, we can start to see the proportions and the feelings and the textures that are coming up, and these become the language of our taste. This is not something to be done quickly. It is a practice that involves patience, waiting for ideas to come instead of trying to make them happen.
Perhaps the greatest thing about reflection is that it allows you to change. Our taste changes. Things we loved in one phase of life no longer feel like us in another. That’s not a contradiction, it’s a progression. When we regularly reflect, we come to accept this and allow it without judgment. We let go of things that used to feel like us but don’t anymore as part of creating a broader vision. This means we don’t carry things that no longer feel like us or perhaps never did.
Because when you reflect regularly, you start to build a reservoir of how you feel about things. You build a mental index of colors and fabrics and moods that are yours. So that when it comes time to make another decision, like paint a new wall, or plan a wedding, or buy a gift, you don’t need to start from scratch. You can use your library. You can see how things match up. And that makes things easier, and less likely to cause you regret, and more likely to help you feel like you’re good at this, because you are. You have practice now.
Ultimately, it’s reflection that takes taste from a series of preferences to a personal aesthetic. It’s the process that connects what we see to how we express what we think is beautiful. Practiced habitually, reflection starts to feel less like an action and more like a state of mind, a meditative state we exist in whenever we see or touch or smell or taste or hear anything. The sort of internal monologue we hold with ourselves, on a daily basis, whenever we engage with the world. Until our taste isn’t something we strive for, but something we embody.
