like blue cheese and olives and gin

"Safety does not come first. Goodness, truth, and beauty come first." 

—The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

In most things, I tend strongly to prefer safety to adventure. This is true in the most literal and straightforward of senses: I use my poverty as an excuse for not traveling or not having traveled, but really, it is timidity that is my largest obstacle. What if I don't know where I am going? What if I look foolish? What if I say the wrong thing? What if I don't know what to do? What if I accidentally try to go some place where I ought not to go? What if I miss my habitual routines and rhythms? What if something terrible happens? etc. etc. So instead I make jokes about it and pretend that this is a choice I affirm. 

There is one area in which I am a little more persistent and daring. I will try most foods at least once; so long as I can get the ingredients and the recipe interests me, I will try new recipes and techniques without hesitation; I revisit foods I have previously disliked in order to see if my tastes have changed; and if there is a food I dislike but want to like, I will eat it until I like it or have good reasons for disliking it. 

Last night at dinner, I told of many of the things I learned to like after I moved to Chicago: blue cheeses, soft-ripened French cheeses, greens, wine, gin, beer, sourdough bread, and, eventually, olives. One lazy summer afternoon, a friend and I looked for some place to linger over cocktails and I told him "Today I will learn to like olives." We ordered dishes of olives and ate them while we sipped our martinis and it happened. It worked. I triumphed. 

In his piece, "How to Be Polite," Paul Ford writes 

Sometimes I’ll get a call or email from someone five years after the last contact and I’ll think, oh right, I hated that person. But they would never have known, of course. Let’s see if I still hate them. Very often I find that I don’t. Or that I hated them for a dumb reason. Or that they were having a bad day. Or much more likely, that I had been having a bad day.

As soon as I read that, I thought back to the conversation at dinner last night and then of my various, hedging timidities and it clicked in place: that's what I can do, that's how I can shift and grow and change. I don't have to know in advance whether I like a person or experience or quality; I don't have to hold myself back from the same just in case I want out. All I have to do is to keep trying it, just as I would a new cheese or an unfamiliar bourbon—taste it and see. Fill my mouth with it and pay attention to all the flavors. Maybe I won't love it right away; maybe it won't make sense, the way an unusual wine can not make sense at first. No matter. I can taste it anyway and then maybe, at some future point, taste it again. 

I can try myself out like a new experience, stretching toward a version of myself that is increasingly bold or confident or daring; a version that is more intensely loving or more insistently present. I don't have to know in advance how that will work out long term, nor do I have to understand everything about it. I can treat it like a new flavor, or like an unusual perfume. Taste and smell and pay attention to see what is there. Do I like it? What do I like? What does it connect to? Can I try a little more and see if I notice anything new?