Umami is the fifth basic taste. Alongside sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, it is the one that is hardest to explain. In Japanese it translates roughly to “pleasant savory taste.” It is the rich, meaty, brothy quality that coats the tongue, lingers after the meal is finished, and makes everything around it taste more like itself. You cannot eat umami by itself. A teaspoon of fish sauce straight from the bottle is not recommended. A spoonful of anchovy paste on its own is not a meal. But leave either one out of the dish and something essential is missing. The whole thing falls flat.
I have been thinking about this a lot lately as it applies to everything that is not food.
I remember summer football practice in the heat. Two-a-days in August, grass drills, the coach running us until someone got sick. I remember cutting the grass on a Saturday afternoon while every one of my friends was somewhere else doing something better. I remember getting fired from my job at the burger stand when I was fifteen. I will spare the details. I deserved it. I remember my dad telling me he was not going to buy me a SEGA game console but that I was welcome to buy one with my own money. I did not buy one. I spent the money on something I have long since forgotten.
The list goes on into adulthood. You have your own version of it. You know exactly what I am talking about.
None of those things felt good at the time. None of them were supposed to. But pull any one of them out of the recipe and I am a different person. A flatter one. Less seasoned. Missing something I would not be able to name but would absolutely be able to taste.
We are living in a moment when it has never been easier to avoid discomfort. For our kids especially. The friction has been engineered out of almost everything.
Entertainment is instant, food is delivered, social connection is frictionless and consequence-free. The hard thing is always optional. The easy path is always right there.
Mountain families know something about this. Anyone who has tried to get a family out the door to a trailhead on a cold morning knows that the hardest part of the hike is not the hike. It is the fifteen minutes before you leave the house. The complaints, the missing gloves, the kid who suddenly does not feel well, the collective inertia of people who were warm and comfortable and are now being asked to be neither. Getting out the door is the thing. Everything after that tends to take care of itself.
Letting your kid wipe out on a mountain bike is as important as watching them land the jump. The wipeout is not the failure of the experience. It is the experience. The scraped knee, the moment of deciding whether to get back on, the discovery that they can get back on and that the next run goes better. That is not something you can give a child. It is something they have to earn in real time, in the dirt, with you watching.
Waking your family up at five in the morning to drive to a pullout and watch the light brush the top of a mountain range is going to be hard. In that moment, standing in the cold before the sun is up, your family will probably hate you a little for it. That is fine. That is the fish sauce. That is the part that does not taste good on its own but makes everything else richer.
The eruption of a geyser at dawn, the wolf moving through the sage, the moment the mountains go purple in the last light of the day. None of those things are available on demand. You have to earn them with early mornings and cold coffee and kids who would rather be asleep. That is the point. That is what makes them matter.
It is more important now than ever to do hard things with our kids. Not hard for the sake of suffering. Hard because the alternative is a life without umami. A life that is technically fine but missing the depth that only comes from having pushed through something.
Live it. Love it. Share it. That is the only way we preserve it.