An algorithm found the shoes.
I had been scrolling through Zalora when a pair of leather sneakers appeared on the screen. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the brand, and no conspicuous logo to tell me what I was supposed to think of them. They were on clearance for about P2,000.
But something about the leather looked unusually good.
Photographs can lie, of course. Leather that looks supple under careful lighting can feel very different once it is in your hand. At that price, I wondered whether I was simply seeing what I wanted to see.
Still, P2,000 seemed a tolerable price for being wrong.
So I ordered a pair.
When the box arrived, I knew almost immediately.
The leather had substance. It yielded properly beneath the fingers. The grain looked right. The construction confirmed what the hand was already saying.
I had known that feeling before.
Decades ago, I worked for Coats Viyella, around people whose working lives revolved around textiles. Wool, silk, cotton, linen — anything that could be spun and woven. For several of those years, I worked in the world around Savile Row.
Spend enough time around good cloth and the fingers begin to learn. Weight, density, weave, resilience, softness, drape: distinctions that once required explanation gradually become something the hand recognizes before the mind has finished naming them.
It was not instinct. It was experience that had learned to feel like instinct.
Someone had taught the hand.
I ordered another pair.
The algorithm deserved some credit. Among thousands of possibilities, it had placed something interesting in front of me. That is no small thing. But it had brought the shoe only as far as the screen.
The algorithm had shortened the search. It had not shortened the years required to know what I had found.
Two years later, the first pair is still going.
The leather has creased and shaped itself to my feet. The soles show that the shoes have actually been worn. But the uppers remain sound. Nothing is peeling or collapsing. They look used, but not used up.
The second pair remains unworn.
Apparently I was better at judging leather than estimating its useful life. About P2,000 of working capital remains stubbornly trapped in inventory.
There are considerably more expensive shoes in my wardrobe. They are beautifully made, and I have no reason to apologize for enjoying them. Yet when a younger colleague asks what one of those pairs cost, I sometimes feel oddly uncomfortable answering.
The price says something about what I can afford.
I am not sure what that teaches them.
I rather enjoy telling the story of the P2,000 pair.
Not because cheapness is a virtue. It isn’t. The pleasure lies in knowing that the price did not tell the whole story.
Perhaps that is one of the quieter privileges of growing older in a craft, profession or vocation. We begin to notice things we once missed.
An accountant looks at a page of numbers and pauses.
Something does not make sense.
Not magic.
Formation.
Years compressed into attention.
And none of us learns entirely by ourselves.
The people I worked with decades ago had acquired their judgment before I acquired mine. Some of it passed to me through proximity, correction, repetition, comparison and attention. What eventually became my eye and my hand had partly been received from others.
That changes what experience is for.
I now work with younger people beginning the long process of developing judgment in their own profession. They do not need me to demonstrate what a senior executive can afford. They already know careers change incomes.
What should matter more is what the distance between my experience and theirs can give them.
Not my answers, but some of the judgment by which, eventually, they will find their own.
The second pair of sneakers is still in its box. The first remains in service, creased now and shaped by use, but nowhere near finished.
Perhaps someday another young colleague will notice them and ask what they cost.
I will probably tell them.
P2,000.
Not because finding a bargain makes anyone wise.
But because the distinction hidden inside that small story took considerably longer than one online purchase to learn.
Price can be printed on a tag.
Value has to be learned.
