The first time someone told me we'd leave when it felt right, I didn't know what to say.

It was about 10 o'clock at night in Taipei. We'd been drinking tea since morning — first at an all-day tasting event, then at dinner, and now at one of the most extraordinary tea houses I'd ever been in. The owner was a scholar and collector, the kind of person who thinks about tea the way a musician thinks about sound. The room was full of people from the tea industry, and the conversation had been flowing as freely as the tea itself.

I was living in Tainan at the time. That's a five-hour drive south. And as the evening stretched on, I started doing the math in my head, the way you do. Ten o'clock means we get home at three in the morning, minimum. I leaned over to my friend — the one who'd brought me on this trip — and asked when we were thinking of heading back.

He looked at me with a kind of calm that I wasn't used to yet. "We're going to drink tea," he said, "until there's a certain feeling. And then we'll go."

I didn't know how to argue with that. I also didn't quite know what it meant. A feeling? What feeling? By what time? But there was no clock in his answer, no schedule, no negotiation to be had. He meant it completely.

So I let go of the math and went back to the tea.

What happened next was one of the best educational experiences I'd had in the tea world up to that point. The host walked us through his collection of tea ware — the way certain pieces were arranged, why certain pots belonged with certain teas, how the objects in a room create an atmosphere that changes what you taste. I was absorbing things I didn't even know I needed to learn.

And then, somewhere around midnight, the feeling arrived. I couldn't tell you exactly what it was — a fullness, a completeness, a sense that the evening had given everything it had to give. We said our goodbyes and got on the road.

We stopped in Taichung on the way, dropping off one of the tea masters who had been with us. He lived about halfway home. As we approached his neighborhood, he'd been telling us about these candied kumquats — building up the story with the kind of slow relish that tea people have for good things. He'd tasted some once in Japan that had cost something like $300 each. He'd been describing the texture, the sweetness, the way the flavor sat in your mouth long after.

When we got to his building, he said: come up, I have some I want to share with you.

So at two in the morning, we sat in his apartment, surrounded by teapots on every surface, while he brewed tea and served us these tiny, luminous kumquats. They were extraordinary.

Then he gestured at a shelf on the wall. He was letting go of the teapots there, he said. Did I like to brew tea? Why didn't I go pick one for myself?

I'd been saving up for a good teapot for a while. I'd been studying them, trying to understand the clay, the craftsmanship, the things that separate a fine pot from an ordinary one. And here was an entire shelf, in the apartment of someone who actually knew.

I went slowly. I looked at each one. I didn't know as much as I wished I did, but I knew enough to recognize quality. I chose a small pot with a distinctive stamp and lines in the clay that told you it had been made by hand. Clean, precise, completely itself.

I still have that teapot. I'm looking at it as I write this.

We got back to Tainan around five in the morning. That was one of my first real immersions into this world — the world of people for whom tea is not a drink but a way of organizing life around beauty and presence and the unhurried moment. When I saw my friend's wife not long after, she laughed and asked if those people had scared me off, keeping me out all night like that.

They hadn't. They'd done the opposite.

I came back with a teapot, a story, and a slowly forming understanding that some of the best things in life don't happen on a schedule. They happen when the feeling is right. And when you stop fighting that, when you stop doing the math and just trust the evening, you sometimes end up somewhere you never could have planned.