On Flan
There is a phrase I have been embracing in my own life, and, by definition, have repeated to several people around me, because I am an external processor who needs to say things out loud for them to feel real:
“Strong opinions, loosely held.”
I didn’t make it up. (It seems like a strategist did in 2008.) But I saw it somewhere a few months ago—and when I say “somewhere” I’m pretty sure it was on Tinx’s Instagram, which is an argument for social media bringing good things into our lives if I’ve ever heard one—and it’s been making loops in my brain since.
“Strong opinions, loosely held” doesn’t mean having carte blanche to say ridiculous things with built-in air cover. Instead, it’s a pithy, four-word synopsis of a philosophy I’ve long held: you only know what you really think, want, or believe if you test it, and finding out you’re wrong about something can be incredible, and one of the most productive ways to know yourself and know what you’re wrong about is to talk to others about it.
I didn’t make up that philosophy, either.
I’m certainly not less happy if I’m proved wrong than if I’ve proved someone else wrong, because, as I see it, I’ve got the best of it: there’s nothing worse than the state which I’ve been saved from, so that’s better for me than saving someone else. — Socrates, from Plato’s Gorgias, 458a
But I do live it out, and out loud, so I’d like to claim so part of it as mine. Kath and Socrates: bros, as it turns out.
Enter La Sillita de la Reina, a tapas bar in Valencia, Spain.
I was sitting outside with Jiji and Charlie and Belen, who I’d known for four months and ten minutes, respectively, because Belen had brought us there after the mascleta—an explosion of gunpowder and fireworks that shakes the ground every day at 2 p.m. during the festival of Fallas—to eat local food and get to know each other.
We all ordered arroz meloso as our starter. The rice came out, swimming in an orange sauce that was as thick and heavy as the war-scented air around us, and we scooped it into shallow spoons and crusts of bread, spooning it over the galeras perched on the edge of our bowls.
We’d gotten onto the topic of families. Who’d lost who. What relationships remained, and what states they were in. Who couldn’t forgive their parent for blaming them for their own unhappiness. Who had taken their father’s side in the divorce—despite him being quite clearly in the wrong—because everyone else had chosen their mother, and that felt unfair.
Your average mariscos-accompanied, testing-out-the-waters-of-new-friendship conversation.
I didn’t agree with the point about post-divorce loyalty. “This is going to sound like I’m criticizing you, and I promise I’m not,” I started. “Let me ask this under the banner of, ‘Strong opinions, loosely held.’ I happen to not believe in unconditional love. I don’t think that you always owe it to people to forgive them for how they’ve hurt you, particularly if they’re unwilling to acknowledge it. Am I wrong? Why do you owe it to your father to stand by him, even if he’s treated you and your mother terribly? What exactly do you owe him, by virtue of the past, when you see no future?”
We paused before getting into the response, because the non-native English speaker among us needed clarification on “strong opinions, loosely held.” No one knew how to translate the phrase perfectly. “Es como…creo esto, pero me puedes convencer que estoy completamente equivocada. Literalmente, opiniones fuertes, pero agarradas ligeramente,” I said, flexing my hand in a loose grip. “It sounds better in English, though.”
And it does. It fits into itself. The trochaic meter: one-two, one-two. It invokes the things you believe most strongly—the value of hard work, whether monogamy is functional, if God exists, for instance—and then immediately encourages you to give that conviction some air. To breathe into the space you’ve made. To know what you don’t know, what you won’t know, what you haven’t yet figured out.
Over segundos—battered boquerones, glinting copper and silver like a fistful of change, and soft white fish with herby vegetables—we had a thoughtful debate about loyalty in families. On what’s owed. On the limits of empathy in both directions of parent-child relationships. You could and should, Jiji argued, hold space for the struggles you can’t understand.
Did I believe her? Could I let go of my opinion about unconditional love and slip on Jiji’s? Would it settle around me in the same sure-fitting it had settled around her?
I’d gotten to Spain the day before. The decision to move here is proof in and of itself that I can and do change my opinions. I had believed certain things my entire life: Work is the center of my identity. My labor is the part of me that is most valuable to others. If I make more money, or have a more prestigious title, or have grinded my way through increasingly unsustainable conditions, I am better than, smarter than, harder working than, and more deserving than other people.
Confronting those opinions, learning to let them go, and replacing them with newer ones—ones grasped gently, like a crush—has taken years. I had to go figure out what I believed, then to get comfortable talking about it, then to ask other people from other places about how they lived and loved and valued things. I learned that there are a lot of ways to build a life.
And I learned that the only thing I owe my beliefs is a willingness to outgrow them. Stalwartness is less of a merit when it comes with blinders on.
I’m still messing it up, constantly. I say I believe in “Strong opinions, loosely held.” But do I?
Even when I’ve witnessed the evolution of opinion within my own self—going from seeing drinking to excess as a moral sin, then whole-heartedly embracing it, then recognizing it as dangerous and sexual-assault-assisting, then dabbling in it here and there, sometimes for fun and sometimes to escape and sometimes to be someone else for a few hours, for instance—I have a hard time embracing it. I have a hard time hearing Jiji’s point about turning the other cheek, and imagining who I would be if I adopted it. What would that mean for the choices I’ve made? The imagined dissonance makes me want to retreat into the safe quarters of my opinion, to pull it so tight around me that there’s no room for doubt.
I didn’t move to Spain to run away from the people that I love in other places I’ve called home. That’s the hardest part about coming here, actually. You are your people, and the ones I left behind are first-rate.
But being here means looking for new people, and I think I’m going to prioritize the ones who see the value in loosening our grips on the things we think we know, and who are comfortable sitting with our collective doubt.
Like the people I broke bread and fish and rice and vegetables and spiny crustaceans with at that lunch.
Because after we moved off of family and onto the less-charged topic of peer pressure, our waiter came out with small white plates of dessert.
On mine: two mandarins, slightly bruised, an underwhelming still life. (When I’d ordered them, I’d imagined they’d come peeled and quartered, served in syrup or juice, in a small sundae glass and accompanying spoon. I was wrong, and laughed as I pocketed them for later.)
On everyone else’s: coffee-flavored flan.
Belen, feeling bad for my terrible order, asked me if I wanted to try hers. I looked at it—glistening like cat food fresh from the can, slimy and wet and brown—and passed vehemently.
“I hate the texture,” I explained. “I’ve never liked textures like that. Baked beans and tres leches cakes are bad enough; flan is the worst.”
“Ah, Katy,” she teased. “That sounds like a strong opinion that’s not very loosely held, eh?”
I froze. She was right!
There was no going back.
I asked for a spoon and tried a bite.
And you know what?
Once you got past the texture—once you smashed the flan against the roof of your mouth and let it fall back onto your tongue in chunks, and swallowed those, instead of one shelf of sludge—it was delicious. It was cream and sugar and coffee. How could it not be?
I have come to Spain with a lot of opinions. About the kind of life I think I want. About the kind of people I think I’ll find here. About the kind of person that I think I’ll be. About the kind of person that the people I think I’ll find here will think that I am.
I’ll be wrong about a lot of them.
Like I was wrong about the flan.
Socrates said, “There’s nothing worse than the state which I’ve been saved from, so that’s better for me than saving someone else.”
The older I get, the less I believe that there’s any value at all in saving others. (That’s if it’s even really possible.)
But the more I appreciate being open enough to others to save myself.
So cheers to the states we’ll be saved from. The ones we don’t even know yet that we’re wrong about.
I can’t wait.
1 Comment
Leave your reply.