You don’t meet whiskey— you collide with it.
No one tells you the first sip isn’t about taste.
It’s about threshold. It sears before it soothes,
humbles before it welcomes.
It does not care for readiness.
The burn lands first—sharp, unforgiving, like a miscalculated risk,
like the sharp snap of a decision you cannot take back.
But before you recoil, something else unfolds—
a slow bloom of warmth,
a whisper of spice, a touch of vanilla, the ghost of oak,
the way time itself leaves traces in the grain.
It’s an odd dance, pain and pleasure, control and surrender.
You believe you are drinking the whiskey,
but the whiskey is drinking you—
testing your patience, revealing layers,
deciding who stays long enough to understand it.
And isn’t that the way of things?
The first steps into the unknow never arrive wrapped in comfort.
Beginnings are raw.
We hesitate, we brace for what we cannot see,
and life—like whiskey—never reveals itself all at once.
The depth, the nuance, the quiet revelations—
they belong to those who linger.
So we take another sip,
not for the fire,
but for the aftertaste of understanding.
For some things
are only understood
in time.
