Eat A Peach

by David Chang

confronting failure, you take fear out of the equation. You stop shying away from ideas just because they seem like they may not work. You start asking whether an idea is “bad” because it’s actually bad or because the common wisdom says so. You begin to thrive when you’re not supposed to. You just have to be comfortable with instability, change, and a great deal of stress.

great art is based on the coupling of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian represents order, beauty, truth, perfection. In culinary terms, it’s a tasting menu. The Dionysian is the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, the extremes of ecstasy and suffering. More like a pig roast or crawfish boil. You don’t fully appreciate one without the other. Order is beautiful because of the underlying chaos in the world. Conversely, works of a wild and unexpected nature are awe-inspiring or tragic or moving because they defy our sense of order.

Life dialectic

In moments of such extreme doubt, I center myself by summoning a memory that’s inextricably tied to a familiar emotion. Fly-fishing for my first permit. The first time I had freshly squeezed orange juice. The birth of my son. Having my heart broken or feeling let down. Anything that is unmistakably real.

True balance is not an average. It is two forces in equal measure. A bowl of rice is bland. A chili relish is too salty and spicy to eat alone. Eaten together, they’re perfect—a constant pull between intensity and mildness.

What we consider to be the objectivity of our senses is actually tied deeply into our frame of reference, which is always moving.

other words, we may not be able to reject our fortune or fate, but we can reject how we approach it. Every day, we have the chance to kill the way the world sees us and push the boulder up the hill with a big, fat smile on our faces. To live life without amends.

If he’d been the father I wanted him to be, I wouldn’t be the man I am.