I've come to a bit of a personal epiphany lately. I read something on here from @BingBong once who said "stop chasing flavor and relax." It was a bit of an eye opening moment for me. Sometimes it just takes someone saying the same way the 100th time in a way to really soak in. As I was relaxing over a bowl of Briar fox and it was just opening up VA flavor in one of those truly special ways, you know what I mean. The "ultimate smoke" as matches used to say. It dawned on me that smoking a pipe is like playing with a cat. When you want really badly to play with the cat, it wants nothing to do with you. If you try and force it you will get scratched and bit... But if you play coy with the thing, pretend you're busy doing other things, they're all over you. I've found this to be true for me at least at this phase in my piping. Anyone else find this to be the case? Do experienced smokers ever get to the point where you can control the cat, put it on a leash and extract the flavors at your discretion? Or are those ultimate smokes just always illusive and unpredictable?
