Everyone needs a secret sauce, a blend of ingredients that when experienced, defeats all stress and evokes bliss.
Every palate is unique. The perfect combination of flavors is 
different for every person. The feelings evoked by a single bite may be bliss or miss, depending on a multitude of factors. As a result, every palate has its own “secret sauce”. This is that perfect combo that trumps everything.
For me, my secret sauce is exactly that – a sauce. My Nono (grandfather) has made hundreds of pans of his sauce over the years, filling his house with the smell of awesome and the aura of glee. It’s a perfect blend of vegetable and meat, spice and heat, tang and sweet. I, like so many, have taken his recipe to try and duplicate it, but to no avail. That’s a distinguishing characteristic of the secret sauce – it’s part sauce and part human. What makes it so great is that my Nono makes it and nobody else. The flavor can be closely duplicated, but the feelings and the experience as a whole cannot. I love the fact that it is made by him, he has been making it for so long, and it has made so many people full and happy over the years. That combination, with the flavor, makes me as happy as can be.
And so there’s a secret sauce of life; a secret sauce for personal delight. For each and every individual there is a unique combination of feeling and experience, not to be duplicated by any other individual, that defeats stress and evokes pure, inner bliss. Surely it could require some physical component such as a a place or a meal or a friend or a game, but it’s not about the food but the mood. The feeling and experience, like that which I own when having my Nono’s pasta sauce, is unique to me and is all I need. For you, maybe it’s Ragu. But it doesn’t matter. We need to know what our secret sauces are and how we can find them. Only then are the ingredients of the world used for the most genuine condition, the most fundamental of purposes, the being of happy.
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kevin berardinelli 