I have always loved argyle.
The diamonds, the intersecting lines, the repetition. Something about it pleases me enormously, although I couldn’t tell you when the preference began or why it has lasted.
Argyle is a peculiar thing to feel strongly about. It has a distinctly collegiate quality. Scottish knitwear, university corridors, professors in cardigans, shelves of books, the slightly romantic idea of an intellectual life. A sweater with diamonds on it has never made anyone smarter, but somehow the association persists.
I like its geometry. The way the diamonds repeat, the fine diagonal lines crossing over them, the balance between structure and movement. From a distance, the arrangement looks orderly. Up close, there is more happening than the first glance suggests.
Someone else might find it country club preppy, overly academic, or reminiscent of a university they never attended. I can appreciate those associations without sharing their conclusions. I don’t love argyle because I want to look like a professor. I love what happens when I look at it.
And I’m hardly committed to diamonds for life. I enjoy other patterns, shapes, colors, and forms. Something entirely unfamiliar might captivate me tomorrow. I hope it does.
Still, why argyle rather than plaid? Why not houndstooth, gingham, or chevron? All have their own geometry and repetition. I can appreciate them without experiencing quite the same affection.
Apparently, my aesthetic sensibilities have rather specific opinions about intersecting lines.
Maybe I associate argyle with academia, tradition, or a particular kind of elegance. Maybe I saw someone wearing it when I was six and decided, without knowing I was deciding, that this was a beautiful thing.
But I don’t remember any such moment.
I simply love argyle.
And that has made me curious about a much larger question.
Why do we love what we love?
Why does one pattern appeal to us while another leaves us indifferent? Why do certain colors, sounds, textures, places, and people seem to possess an almost immediate significance? Why can we walk into a room and feel something shift before anyone has spoken?
We often call it energy. Sometimes we call it presence. And when something outside us seems to meet something within us, we call it resonance.
I wonder how much of that experience we actually understand.
Psychologists have spent decades studying why we find certain things pleasing. Research on processing fluency, for example, suggests that we often respond favorably to patterns our minds can perceive and organize with relative ease. Symmetry, repetition, and familiarity can influence aesthetic preference.
Argyle seems an excellent candidate. Its diamonds form a recognizable rhythm. The crossing lines introduce variation without making the pattern difficult to follow. The eye can take in the whole arrangement and still find details worth examining.
That might explain why argyle is pleasing. It doesn’t explain why it pleases me more than another equally orderly pattern.
Robert Zajonc’s research on mere exposure suggests that repeated encounters can increase our liking for something. Familiarity can make a stimulus feel more comfortable or appealing.
I have probably encountered argyle hundreds of times. On sweaters, socks, scarves, in shop windows, perhaps on people I no longer remember. Any one of those encounters might have contributed to my affection.
Yet I’ve encountered plenty of plaid, too.
A mechanism may help explain how a preference develops without telling us why a particular preference becomes part of who we are.
And some attractions seem to arrive before direct experience.
We can feel drawn to a country we’ve never visited, a language we cannot speak, a musical tradition we know almost nothing about. Something in the landscape, architecture, sound, or imagined rhythm of life captures our attention. We return to photographs, books, recordings, and stories long before we have the opportunity to encounter the place itself.
Years later, we might finally go.
The first sight of a street, the cadence of voices around us, the particular quality of afternoon light may feel astonishingly welcome. We arrive somewhere we’ve never been, yet something in our bodies recognizes it before our minds can explain why. We have found something that seems to have been waiting in our cells and our imagination for years. Or lifetimes, if you’re inclined to entertain the possibility.
I wonder whether certain preferences reveal parts of ourselves we haven’t yet had the opportunity to know.
We usually explain our tastes by looking backward, toward childhood, family, culture, and experience. But an attraction can also lead us forward. It can introduce us to a place, a skill, an art form, or a way of living and being that expands our understanding of what we enjoy and who we might become.
I may never discover where my affection for argyle began. I can still imagine walking into a shop tomorrow, seeing a pattern I’ve never encountered, and feeling that same immediate pleasure. I like the thought that my capacity for delight remains larger than the collection of things I already love.
It becomes even more fascinating when we move from objects and places to people.
We all know people who are admirable by almost every conventional measure. Intelligent, charming, attractive, accomplished, generous, interesting. We recognize their qualities. We may genuinely enjoy their company.
And yet nothing particularly stirs.
Then someone else enters our lives.
They may possess none of the qualities we once imagined wanting. They may fall outside our familiar patterns, bear little resemblance to the person our family expected or our friends would choose, and defy the description we would have given if someone had asked us to make a list.
Still, something about their presence reaches us.
Maybe it is the way they listen. Their particular rhythm of speech. The unexpected combination of seriousness and playfulness. The way they move through a room, or the way silence feels when they are nearby.
There are people with whom conversation is effortless and people with whom silence is effortless. These are not necessarily the same people.
Sometimes we’re drawn to qualities we recognize in ourselves. Someone else’s curiosity, intellect, humor, or courage feels familiar because it reflects something we value in our own nature.
Other times we’re drawn to qualities that seem to balance or enlarge our own.
A person who has spent years being responsible may find another person’s spontaneity irresistible. Someone accustomed to uncertainty may be moved by steadiness. We might admire a person’s willingness to speak freely because we recognize our own courage, or because their freedom awakens something we’ve kept carefully contained.
I think again of argyle’s geometry. The diamonds and the finer lines have different roles in the design. Their intersection gives the pattern its distinctive character. I can describe each element separately, but what captivates me is the arrangement they make together.
Something similar can happen between people. Qualities that seem unremarkable when listed individually can become unexpectedly compelling in combination. A serious person with a wonderfully soft side and an absurd sense of humor. Someone intellectually formidable who becomes shy when receiving a compliment. Someone gregarious who is unexpectedly bashful when affection turns toward them. Someone gentle who possesses extraordinary resolve.
We can name the qualities and still find ourselves surprised by the person.
Sometimes even the qualities that initially irritate us become objects of affection. A peculiar laugh. A stubborn habit. The unnecessarily elaborate and long-winded way someone tells a story. The behavior may remain exactly the same while our relationship to it changes.
And that raises another question.
Do we always love something because we find it beautiful, or can loving something teach us to see beauty there?
A face becomes more interesting through familiarity. An ordinary gesture acquires significance. A song we once barely noticed becomes unforgettable because of the person who played it for us. A street becomes beautiful because of an afternoon we spent walking along it.
I wonder whether my affection for argyle has changed the way I see it. Maybe I now notice subtleties in the spacing, colors, and intersecting lines that would escape someone indifferent to the pattern. What first caught my eye has taught my eye where to linger.
Affection changes what we notice. What we notice can deepen affection.
We say we like someone’s energy.
It is an imprecise expression, but maybe that is why it survives. It allows us to describe an experience that seems larger than any single observable quality.
Presence is equally difficult to pin down.
Some people are immediately noticeable because they are loud, charismatic, or visually striking. Others have a presence that reveals itself more slowly. They may barely speak, yet something about being near them changes the atmosphere of an ordinary afternoon.
Research on interpersonal synchrony offers one possible piece of the puzzle. Human beings respond to shared rhythms, coordinated movement, facial expressions, and subtle patterns of interaction. Our sense of connection is influenced by more than the words we exchange.
But knowing that people can synchronize doesn’t tell us why we fall into rhythm with one person and struggle to find it with another.
Two people can inhabit the same conversation and leave with entirely different experiences of what occurred. One remembers an ordinary afternoon. The other remembers the precise moment the light changed, the sound of a laugh, the curious sensation that something important had just entered their life.
I find myself returning to the distinction between recognition and understanding.
We recognize a melody before we remember its name. We recognize a place in a photograph before we can locate it. We can be moved by music without knowing anything about its composition.
And sometimes we recognize an attraction in a blink’ before we know what to make of it.
Malcolm Gladwell explored rapid judgment in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. He examines how people can sometimes recognize meaningful patterns from remarkably little information, even before they can articulate the basis of their judgment.
I think about this when someone encounters a painting and immediately loves it.
Before learning who painted it, what it is worth, or whether anyone else considers it beautiful, something has already happened. Then comes the explanation. The art history. The critical opinion. The assessment of whether the painting deserves our admiration.
I have never needed an art historian to explain why argyle pleases me. I see it, and I smile. The explanation, should I ever find one, will arrive considerably later.
We do something similar with people.
An encounter captivates us, surprises us, or leaves us unusually attentive. Then comes the noise. Expectations formed long before we ever met this person begin competing with what we actually feel. We ask whether they make sense, whether the attraction is reasonable, whether someone else would approve.
I wonder how often that process deepens our understanding, and how often it simply teaches us to distrust our own instincts.
And sometimes the encounter does something else. It reveals us to ourselves.
We may spend years in a chaotic relationship, gradually participating in patterns that trouble us. We accommodate uncertainty, anticipate disappointments, repeat arguments, and become remarkably skilled at managing an emotional environment we never particularly enjoyed. We allow ourselves to inhabit that shadow until its familiar contours begin to feel like our personality.
Then we encounter someone different.
Their calm reveals our restlessness. Their generosity makes us aware of our difficulty receiving. Their openness illuminates our guardedness. Their courage brings our hesitation into view. Their boldness reveals the parts of ourselves we’ve been afraid to express.
They may simply be themselves, without any intention of teaching us a lesson. Yet something about their presence makes visible what we’ve learned to tolerate, what we’ve kept hidden, and what we might be capable of expressing.
The familiar relationship can reflect our conditioning. An unfamiliar one can reveal our capacity.
Neither person can undertake that inner work for us. What we do with the reflection belongs to us.
But not every powerful attraction leads us toward growth. Some draw us back into familiar wounds, compulsions, and relational patterns. Their intensity may feel significant precisely because we recognize the emotional environment, even when it has hurt us.
Others introduce us to a higher possibility of ourselves.
Attraction is information. What we do with it determines whether we repeat ourselves or expand ourselves.
And the experience can be unsettling. We might feel drawn toward a person whose presence is deeply safe and comforting while simultaneously confronting parts of ourselves we’ve avoided for years.
What an extraordinary contradiction: to recognize something we want and discover that receiving it asks us to grow.
I wonder whether this is one reason certain encounters feel unusually significant.
Call it cosmic, destiny, soul contracts, or whatever language comes closest to that peculiar sensation that someone has entered our life for a reason.
I am fascinated by the possibility that some relationships reveal not only who we’ve been, but who we might become.
And what about the things we feel called to create?
How many unconventional ideas have been abandoned because they sounded ridiculous when spoken aloud? How many people have felt an unmistakable pull toward a particular kind of work, only to be reminded that they already had a perfectly respectable career?
Sara Blakely cut the feet off a pair of pantyhose because she wanted a smoother silhouette beneath her white pants. That small act of improvisation eventually became Spanx, a billion-dollar business.
I wonder how many ideas disappear before they have a chance to become anything because someone else thinks they’re ridiculous.
A business, a book, a painting, a different way of living. Something captures our imagination and stays there. We find ourselves returning to it, imagining possibilities, noticing details other people overlook.
Why this idea? Why this calling? Why devote years to something other people cannot yet see?
Entrepreneurship and leadership can become profound spiritual journeys. We begin with an idea or an ambition, then the work begins reflecting our limitations back to us.
Our need for approval. Our fear of rejection. Our discomfort with uncertainty. Our attachment to control. The distance between the courage we admire and the courage we’re willing to practice.
We discover how much of our confidence depended on being competent in familiar circumstances. How much of our identity rested on knowing what came next. How easily we could speak about possibility when we weren’t yet required to act on it.
The calling doesn’t necessarily create these limitations. It brings them into view.
We can return to a familiar role where our abilities are already established and the expectations are predictable. Or we can do nothing at all.
Both can feel easier than pursuing something that excites us while exposing everything we have yet to learn.
I wonder how many people have mistaken the discomfort of growth for evidence that they were pursuing the wrong thing.
And sometimes, before any of that unfolds, there is only an inexplicable pull.
About fifteen years ago, I followed what I can only describe as a blink’ to India. I trusted strangers, committed to years of spiritual training, and was scared shitless.
I went anyway. And I kept following my heart around the world.
That first decision led me to people, places, and experiences that revealed layers of myself I hadn’t known existed. Some discoveries thrilled me. Others confronted limitations and fears I hadn’t realized I carried.
Looking back, I wonder what that younger version of me recognized before she could possibly understand where it would lead.
Somehow, I became the person I knew, but didn’t yet know I needed to be.
I recently encountered a woman suggesting that intuition might be a message from our future selves. In her telling, your heart’s pull could be a future regret reaching backward, while an inexplicable sense of knowing might carry the excitement or gratitude of a future already lived.
What a fascinating possibility to contemplate.
We usually search our past to explain why we’re drawn toward something. But what if some attractions point toward futures we haven’t yet imagined?
I think about the woman who went to India without knowing what awaited her. If I could speak to her now, I would have so much to tell her. About the people she would meet, the places she would travel, the teachings she would encounter, and the parts of herself she would have to confront.
Would she have gone if she’d known everything?
I don’t know.
But I am grateful she listened to something she couldn’t yet explain.
What if some of the people, projects, and places that draw us most powerfully are invitations from the person we have yet to become?
What we love can reveal who we are. What we dare to love—and how we choose to engage with it—can help reveal who we might become.
There is a psychological way to approach this question. We can imagine possible futures, anticipate regret, and sense possibilities that our conscious reasoning hasn’t fully organized. And there is the more mysterious possibility the woman raised: that what feels like intuition is somehow connected to a future version of ourselves.
I find both interesting, though they make different claims about how the world works.
What stays with me is the experience of recognition before understanding.
We feel drawn toward a person, a place, a calling, or an unfamiliar way of life. We cannot know everything that awaits us there. We may not even know what the attraction is asking of us.
Yet something responds.
Someone else sees diamonds and diagonal lines. I see the same diamonds and diagonal lines and feel an immediate rush of pleasure.
The difference begins in what catches our attention.
What happens next depends, in part, on whether we allow ourselves to commit to the adventure and follow our heart.
We are perfectly comfortable loving argyle without consulting anyone. Nobody demands that I justify my preference for intersecting diamonds.
But love for another human being, a calling, or a life we feel compelled to build is rarely granted the same freedom.
We inherit expectations about whom we should find admirable, acceptable, and worthy of our affection. We inherit expectations about what constitutes a sensible career, a successful business, and a respectable ambition. Some are spoken openly. Others settle into us so early that we mistake them for our own preferences.
We develop a type. We inherit an aesthetic. We learn what an attractive life is supposed to look like. We become fluent in describing what we want, often with considerable confidence, until something entirely unexpected captures us.
Then comes the argument.
Why would I like that? It isn’t my style. That isn’t my kind of person. I’ve never been interested in that sort of thing.
As though our previous preferences were contractual obligations.
Imagine applying that logic to a sweater. I couldn’t possibly like argyle; I’ve always worn stripes. The diamonds are completely inconsistent with my established preferences. What would people think?
It’s an absurd way to approach knitwear. Yet we can be remarkably serious about applying the same reasoning to our lives.
A person may recognize an attraction or a calling immediately and spend months or years arguing with it because it is inconvenient to the story they have told themselves about their life.
Why this person?
Why this path?
Why not something that looks better on paper?
It is remarkable how often we ask our heart to defend itself before an imaginary committee.
And the committee is surprisingly well attended. Family expectations, cultural conventions, previous disappointments, the opinions of friends, and an earlier version of ourselves who was quite certain about what life should look like.
The committee has a timeline, too. Which schools to attend. Which degrees to earn. Which jobs are respectable. How quickly we should climb the corporate ladder. Whom to marry, and by what age. Two children, one dog, a house with a white picket fence. Preferably in that order.
Everyone has an opinion. Some of them have been dead for decades.
The prescribed arrangement is almost as orderly as a row of diamonds. Each milestone has its place. Each line is expected to lead neatly to the next. From a distance, the pattern is reassuringly recognizable.
But who decided that this particular arrangement should be ours?
Sometimes we discover that we’ve spent years pursuing paths we were never particularly drawn to in the first place. Somewhere along the way, we learned to distrust that initial flicker of recognition, to explain away our intuition and our heart, and to follow the familiar pattern instead. We became so practiced at choosing what made sense to everyone else that we stopped asking what genuinely moved us.
Consider how we dress.
Some people can tell you precisely what the fashion magazines have declared desirable this season, yet struggle to tell you what they actually love. They’ve become fluent in the preferences of designers, editors, influencers, and strangers whose approval they may never receive.
I wonder how many people have gone years without allowing themselves a spontaneous, gloriously eccentric Tuesday.
An unusual color combination. An extravagant scarf. A pair of shoes that makes absolutely no sense with the rest of the outfit but somehow makes the entire day better.
Imagine seeing a beautiful argyle sweater, feeling an immediate little thrill, and putting it back because someone announced that diamonds were out this season.
Out according to whom?
The sweater hasn’t changed. The attraction hasn’t changed. Only the imagined audience has entered the room.
And sometimes the audience has considerably more influence over our choices than the person who will actually be wearing the sweater.
The same thing happens with the people we’re drawn to.
We meet someone who doesn’t resemble anyone we’ve loved before. The conversation surprises us. Their presence feels different. Something in us responds before we’ve had time to consult our usual preferences.
We compare them with our past. We revisit the list. We remind ourselves of the type we’ve always preferred, as though repetition were evidence of good judgment.
Eventually, we may return to what we know, even when what we know has made us miserable.
Something genuinely different asks us to imagine a life for which we have no rehearsed response.
And sometimes the unfamiliar person or possibility challenges us because it reflects precisely what we’ve avoided confronting within ourselves.
I wonder how often we call that discomfort a warning when it is the sensation of encountering something new.
I find it extraordinary that we can recognize the repetition of a pattern without questioning why we keep choosing it.
What happens when something unfamiliar catches our attention? Do we investigate? Do we allow ourselves to be surprised? Or do we return to the familiar because it is easier to explain?
I want to remain open to whatever genuinely moves me.
I can love argyle without requiring every sweater I own to feature diamonds. I can admire an entirely different design without retreating to what has always felt comfortable and familiar. My affection for one pattern has never prevented me from discovering another.
Why should our understanding of ourselves be any less generous?
If something draws me in, I want to stay curious about it. If someone surprises me, I want to continue discovering who they are rather than immediately measuring them against who I expected to meet. If an idea captures my imagination, I want to explore what might become possible by wholeheartedly pursuing it.
My own spiritual tradition, Śrī Vidyā, has given me another way to contemplate these questions.
In that lineage, geometry is not merely decorative. The Śrī Yantra, with its interlocking triangles and central bindu, is approached through a relationship of form, mantra, attention, and consciousness.
Studying sacred geometry has made me attentive to the relationship between form and the consciousness encountering it.
A shape exists before us. We look at it. Something happens within our awareness.
The geometry can be described mathematically. Its history can be traced. Its cultural meaning can be studied.
None of those descriptions is identical to the experience of encountering it.
Someone could reproduce an argyle pattern from a precise description of its geometry without ever knowing why I find it beautiful.
Years of contemplating geometric forms have also made me more aware of how attention changes an encounter. A pattern glanced at casually is not quite the same experience as a pattern studied patiently, even when the arrangement of lines remains identical.
Kashmir Shaivism offers another idea through Spanda, often translated as pulsation or vibration. It concerns the dynamic nature of consciousness, a movement more subtle than ordinary physical vibration.
I am drawn to the philosophical possibility that awareness is not simply a passive observer of the world. There is participation in perception. We bring our histories, attention, desires, and consciousness to what we encounter.
The tradition of Pratyabhijñā, or recognition, also interests me. Its philosophical concern is the recognition of our fundamental nature as consciousness. But the very idea of recognition invites me to think about the moments when an encounter makes something within us newly visible.
A person may reflect a capacity for tenderness we haven’t allowed ourselves to express. A calling may expose a courage we admire but haven’t yet practiced. A place may awaken a sense of belonging we didn’t know we were seeking.
The person, place, or possibility may remain entirely itself. What changes is what we come to recognize within ourselves through the encounter.
The same pattern can appear before two people and become two entirely different experiences. The same person can walk into a room and be barely noticed by one individual while profoundly affecting another. The same unconventional idea can be dismissed by a hundred people and become the consuming fascination of the person who eventually brings it into the world.
There is room to investigate what happens in the brain and nervous system while also asking what the experience means to the person having it.
I suspect we sometimes become so determined to explain our preferences that we overlook the joy of discovering them.
We want a biography of every attraction. A psychological origin story. A reason that will make our choices intelligible to ourselves and, preferably, acceptable to everyone else.
I could probably construct a convincing account of why I love argyle. Its symmetry. Its geometry. Its academic associations. The possibility that I encountered it during a particularly happy period of childhood.
I would enjoy knowing.
But I also wonder what would change if I did.
Would the explanation make argyle more beautiful? Would knowing the precise history of my preference make the pleasure any greater?
And if I could identify every psychological, biological, and social influence that drew me toward another person, would I understand what it feels like to love them?
I doubt those are quite the same kind of understanding.
We can know a great deal about the conditions that make an experience possible while remaining astonished that the experience belongs to us.
I think about all the things I might have loved but never encountered. The music I have yet to hear. The cities I have never visited. The people whose presence might have mattered enormously had our lives intersected at a different moment. The ideas I might never have explored if I’d listened only to what other people considered sensible.
And I think about the things I did encounter because, at some unexpected moment, I was willing to follow a feeling I couldn’t explain.
Somewhere there may be another pattern I’ve never seen that will captivate me as much as argyle. There may be a place whose streets will feel strangely familiar on my first visit, a piece of music that will stop me in the middle of an ordinary day, a person whose combination of qualities I could never have thought to request, or an unexpected calling that changes the direction of my life.
There is something unsettling and wonderful about that possibility.
Our preferences feel intimate, almost essential to who we are, yet many depend on accidents of exposure, geography, timing, and circumstance.
And still, when something resonates, the experience can feel remarkably specific.
This one.
This sound.
This place.
This person.
This idea.
This ridiculous arrangement of diamonds on a sweater.
This beautifully complicated human.
And I don’t intend to stop discovering other things that fascinate me. Other patterns, other places, other ways of seeing the world. I don’t need every new affection to resemble an old one, or every unexpected attraction to fit a description I wrote before encountering it.
If something moves me, I want to stay to know what it is. I want to continue paying attention, remain curious, and discover what becomes of that first spark when I come to know it better.
I see little value in pretending I wasn’t moved simply because someone else would have chosen differently.
I can continue asking why.
And I can continue loving argyle while I do.
