To Find, To Keep, To Cherish
To find
a person
with whom
you can talk
without hearing clichés,
pompous nonsense,
cocky idiocies,
lies,
false assurances,
cheap vulgarities,
or the specialist babble of an “expert”
for whom industry-specific education
plus the ability to hold a fork
constitutes the entirety of their culture—
someone without mental flat-footedness
and without a bootlicker’s mentality—
is to find a treasure.
— Waldemar Łysiak, Deserted Islands (Wyspy bezludne)
Last week, I encountered someone with a curious nickname: Treasure. At first, it didn’t appear to have one. I listened. It was a voice eager to say something meaningful.
Yesterday, I watched a podcast with one of my favourite elderly psychologists. The episode explored a question: What are our first cherished moments in life?
The answers were telling.
Men recalled achievement milestones:
“My first car.”
“My first paycheck.”
“My first trip abroad.”
“My first business.”
“My first kiss.”
Women, on the other hand, more often named relational moments:
“The day my child was born.”
“My first ‘I love you.’”
“My mother braiding my hair.”
It was suggested—carefully, not dogmatically—that while men often cherish what they did, women more often cherish whom they were with.
Of course, this isn’t a binary truth. There are men who remember the scent of their grandmother’s kitchen more vividly than any promotion. And there are women who cherish the first award they earned more than the memory of a summer love. Nevertheless, patterns reveal something about our psyche.
What Do We Cherish?
Psychological studies help us dig deeper. In a large-scale analysis by Dr. Shalom Schwartz, values that humans across cultures most consistently cherish include benevolence, achievement, security, and self-direction. But what turns an experience into something truly cherished is not its scale—it’s its emotional salience.
In other words: it’s not how big the moment is, it’s how deeply it hit us.
Psychologist Dan McAdams, known for his work on narrative identity, suggests that people construct their sense of self through the stories they tell about their lives. The most cherished moments are the ones that become central to those stories—the times we felt most alive, most ourselves, most connected, or most changed.
This is why some people say their most cherished moment was standing at a parent’s grave, while others recall a moment of unexpected laughter at a serious meeting. The moment doesn’t need to be grand. It needs to be true.
I thought again of Treasure, the person—not the idea. In our age of endless stimulation and surface interaction, real conversation is rare. The kind where you feel safe to be honest, where nothing is trying to sell itself or impress you.
It made me think: perhaps what we truly cherish—whether it's a first child or a first success—is not the event, but the felt experience of meaning, of presence, of being fully seen or fully seeing.
“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”
— Carl Jung
Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong writes:
“Memory is a choice… it is not the past itself but how we carry it forward that matters.”
In his work, memories are small things: the weight of a mother’s hand, the sound of a zipper, the way light hit a shoelace. Vuong shows us that the most cherished things are personal truths.
That is what a real conversation can do. That is what makes a person a treasure. They help you carry forward the right memories. They sharpen your focus on what matters. They sit with you not to fix or flatter but to reflect.
Sometimes they sigh.
Sometimes they don’t know yet how to speak, or dare to speak only in your presence.
Perhaps the most important moments are the ones when someone gets you.
When you feel real.
“The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another.”
— David Whyte
