15 Oct What We Thought We Knew
At a table near mine, a mother was deciding between a cup or a bowl of butternut squash soup. She asked her little girl if she might want some, too.
“I don’t like soup!” The girl said it with the disbelief of someone who could not understand how her mother had missed such a well-established fact. Then she lifted one small hand, her fingernails painted hot pink, and began counting on her fingers. “One, soup is too hot. Two, I don’t like things all mixed together. And three, hamburgers are better than soup.”
With that settled, her mother ordered the cup.
When it arrived, the little girl watched her mother take the first bite, then asked if she could try some. Her mother pushed the cup across the table and offered her the spoon. She took one bite, then another, pulling the cup a little closer each time.
Finally, she looked at her mother. “You can have my hamburger. You’ll like it.”
And that was that. Three carefully counted reasons, abandoned without defense. She seemed entirely untroubled by the inconsistency.
Children do this all the time. They hate strawberries until they want them every morning. They refuse anything purple and then choose the purple backpack. A sworn enemy before lunch can somehow be a best friend again by recess. Their opinions can be fierce. Their allegiance to them is often wonderfully loose.
We get older and become better keepers of the record. I’m shy. I’m terrible with numbers. I’m not athletic. I hate speaking in front of a group. I could never live somewhere cold. I’m not outdoorsy. We collect these things over the years and keep saying them, sometimes long after we can remember exactly when we decided they were true. What began as an opinion, a preference, or a conclusion drawn from experience becomes something more settled. Something we know about ourselves.
There is a luxury in allowing ourselves to change our minds, uncomfortable as it can be. We have invested years in knowing what we like, what we believe, what we’re good at, who we are. Other people know some of these things about us, too. Revising any of it can feel strangely like being inconsistent, as though the person we are today owes something to all the versions who came before.
Children don’t seem to require the same continuity. They can be completely certain and then, five minutes later, completely available to what comes next. They don’t need to defend the old opinion or explain the new one. Both can belong to them.
There is freedom in leaving a little room to be wrong about ourselves. We can honor what we knew then without asking it to decide what we know now.