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What a stranger in a liquor store taught me about originality

I wasn’t supposed to learn anything that day. I was just there. My friend needed wine for a birthday, I had nothing better to do, so I tagged along. A liquor store on a Saturday. The last place you’d expect your thinking to shift.

I was standing around, doing nothing, just watching people move through the aisles, when I noticed a man in front of the Rioja section. Spanish wine. He was taking his time in a way that felt almost strange. There were bottles right in front of him, clean, upright, easy to grab. He ignored them completely.

Instead, he reached past the display bottle and went into the back, the stock section where bottles lie on their sides, flat and dusty, stacked low. He moved the top ones carefully, one by one, and pulled out a bottle from the very bottom. It was dirty. Visibly dusty. He held it from the top, didn’t wipe it, didn’t fuss with it. Just carried it to the counter like that.

I followed him. I don’t know why. Something about the way he moved made me want to see what happened next.

At the counter, the cashier reached for something, a cloth or a tissue, and cleaned the bottle. Routine. Trying to be helpful. The man watched him do it, and then said something I wasn’t expecting.

“You should never clean a bottle like that. I picked it because it was untouched. That’s what I wanted.”

He wasn’t angry. He was calm, almost gentle about it. He explained that the bottle lying at the bottom had been sitting in its natural position, undisturbed, for a long time. Nobody had picked it up. Nobody had moved it around or put it back. The dirt on it wasn’t a problem. It was proof. Proof that the wine had been left alone to do what wine is supposed to do.

Then he said something that hit differently.

“People love things that have been untouched. That’s the whole point.”

He gave the cashier another example. When you go to buy a used car and you open the trunk and it’s spotless, that should worry you. A clean trunk on a used car means something was hidden. Something was managed. The dirt, the wear, the small signs of age, those are honest. Those tell you the car has been in its natural state, nothing replaced, nothing concealed.

Cleanliness, in that context, is a red flag. Not a reassurance.

I stood there absorbing this. And then it started expanding in my head far beyond wine and cars.

There is a concept in Japanese aesthetics called wabi-sabi. It’s the beauty of imperfect, incomplete, impermanent things. A cracked tea bowl. A weathered wooden beam. Something that has aged without interference. Western culture tends to see these things as flaws to be corrected. Wabi-sabi says no, the crack is where the beauty lives. The patina is the point.

That man in the wine store understood this without needing a word for it.

And then I thought about Marcus Aurelius. He was the most powerful man in the world, emperor of Rome, and he spent his private journal, the one he never intended anyone to read, reminding himself of one thing above everything else: don’t be disturbed. Don’t let the noise of the world alter what you are underneath. Stay in your natural form. Let things be what they are.

“Confine yourself to the present.” Not the performance of the present. The present itself, raw and unedited.

He was writing about the same thing. The undisturbed life. The self that hasn’t been cleaned up for public consumption.

We live in a time obsessed with presentation. Everything gets filtered, curated, packaged. People build personal brands. Companies polish their image. We clean the bottle before anyone can see it. And in doing so, we erase the very thing that makes something worth trusting.

Originality isn’t about being rough or unfinished for its own sake. It’s about being real. People don’t want the version of you that’s been scrubbed for the display shelf. They want the one that’s been sitting quietly at the back, untouched, aging into itself.

The cashier cleaned that bottle out of habit, out of a desire to help, and I think most of us do the same thing to ourselves and to others without realizing it. We smooth things out. We make them presentable. We think we’re adding value. But sometimes what we’re actually doing is removing the evidence of something genuine.

I didn’t spend a penny that day. I didn’t go looking for any of this. I was at a liquor store because my friend needed wine for a birthday. And somewhere between the Rioja shelf and the checkout counter, a stranger I’ll never see again handed me something I’ll carry for the rest of my life.

That’s how it usually works. The real lessons don’t announce themselves. They’re just lying there at the bottom, a little dusty, waiting for someone willing to reach past the clean ones at the front.

Gaurav Kunwar