have a favorite of everything
I think you should have a favorite everything.
A favorite mug. A favorite season, pen, ice cream flavor, song to play when it rains. A favorite table at the coffee shop and a favorite route home even if it takes three minutes longer. You should know which side of the bed you prefer and which plate you secretly hope is clean when you open the cabinet.
Not because any of these things matter very much.
Maybe because they don't.
We live in a strange time for preference. There is always something new to try, somewhere better to go, another recommendation waiting. Before you've finished one book, you already have six saved for later. You find a restaurant you love and somehow feel like going back would be wasting an opportunity to try somewhere new. Even our music arrives in playlists designed to make sure we never have to sit with the same song for too long.
There is so much available to us that sometimes I wonder if we've confused having more choices with knowing what we like.
Having favorites requires repetition.
You have to order the same thing enough times to miss it when you don't. You have to return somewhere until the person behind the counter starts recognizing you. You have to play a song far past the point of discovering it and let it attach itself to a particular year of your life.
Maybe that's why favorites feel strangely important now.
They give things permanence.
A favorite isn't necessarily the best thing you've ever encountered. That's almost impossible to prove anyway. It's simply something you've encountered and decided, I want to keep this.
And I think there is something nice about becoming a person who can be known through those decisions.
Someone passes a bakery and already knows what they'd bring you. They remember which character you always choose in a game. They know you hate the orange candies but will happily take the red ones. They see something in a shop window and, without really knowing why, think, that's so you.
Maybe that's part of what we're doing when we choose favorites.
We're making ourselves specific.
The world will keep offering us something new, something better, something we haven't tried yet.
But I don't think a life becomes more interesting by experiencing everything.
I think it becomes interesting when, out of everything you could have loved, you know what you chose to love twice.