Falling in Love with Ambiguity

Author: Bingling Zhou, Andrea

一、

There is a coffee machine in a small town in Bohol that should not exist.

It is professional, expensive - worth more than most people there earn in months. For five years it sat idle in a man's house, gathering dust. The sensible thing was to sell it. Instead, at seventy, he built a whole café around it, and he will not let it go.

I had come to the Philippines to raise the GDP. I am only half joking. We arrived as business students, trained to turn lives into numbers, and we measured his: 870 pesos a day, about 15 dollars of profit. We built him a neat little system to track it. He wasn't interested. It took us three weeks to see why - and it wasn't that he couldn't do the math. He could. He knew the gas, the cost of a cup, the break-even. He just refused to be summed up by it.

His café was never about profit. It kept his hands busy. It gave him a reason to trade jokes with the regulars and walk the neighbours' kids home from school. It kept him, with dignity, on the right side of idleness. By that measure he had already arrived. The 870 pesos wasn't his failure; it was the rounding error on a sum he'd solved long ago. Optimizing it would have been adding sugar to a cup that was already sweet.

In most businesses, ambiguity is what kills you - the unclear margin, the drifting plan. In his, it was the whole point. He worked to live, not the other way round, and he was happy in the doing, so the result could stay loose. Zhuangzi had a phrase for it: 无用之用, the use of the useless. The crooked tree no carpenter wants - too gnarled to cut straight - is the one left alone long enough to shade a village. Laozi said it of water: it takes the shape of whatever holds it, flows around whatever blocks it, and can't be gripped. The man ran his café like water. We kept trying to pour it into a cup.

That was the first thing the trip taught me, and the word I keep reaching for is ambiguity. I think I've fallen a little in love with it.

二、

We're taught to read ambiguity as a problem: a sentence that means two things, a person you can't quite place. But it might be the most honest thing about someone. It means there's more than one way to read them, and no reading gets the last word.

Still, we file each other fast. Failing businessman. Stubborn old man. Sweet, but behind the times. We hand each other tags like name badges and then talk only to the badge. You're the diligent one. You're the dreamer. You sold out. You gave up. But no one is a tag. You can grind for a future you only half believe in and, the same night, lose yourself dancing on an empty street - and both are you, with nothing to reconcile.

The people I came to love on this trip were the ones who wouldn't file each other - strangers from across the world, friends from my own city. What they shared was simple: they met you as an equal. No winning, no concluding. They held your opinion the way you hold something alive, without closing a hand around it. To love someone's ambiguity is to refuse to finish them. And to be loved that way is to be left unfinished too - still allowed to change.

I've come to think love works best like this too. Sometimes the person I won't finish is one I could fall for, and I step back - almost proud, telling myself I'm leaving them open, unjudged, free. For a long time I called that restraint. Lately it looks more like fear in better clothes.

There's a difference between refusing to reduce a person and refusing to risk them, and I have spent years confusing the two. Leaving someone unfinished is generous. Holding every feeling at arm's length and calling that distance wisdom is the same fear, only renamed. I run each feeling through the ledger before I'll let myself have it - weigh it, price it, check the timing and the odds and the downside. I have optimized my own heart the way I tried to optimize that café, and with about as much success. I came all that way to watch the man refuse to be summed up, and didn't notice I'd been doing it to myself for years.

People are not problems to solve. Most of us are irrational animals who live from the chest, and the thinking only arrives afterward, dressed as the reason we did it. I forgot that about myself. I have been thinking everything for so long that it has started to ache - a dull ache, the kind that makes you suspect a whole stretch of your life slipped past while you were busy being careful. I don't want to be clever about love anymore. I want the older, dumber courage: to like someone and just say so, to walk toward a person without solving them first, to let it be irrational, and let it cost me something.

Some of it will die quickly. But there's a death that's beautiful because the thing was whole while it lasted, and a death that's only you killing it early so it can never frighten you. I've called both of them wisdom. Just one of them ever was.

三、

And then the question turns on me. Because I'm the one running - forward, upward, fast - and if I'm honest, I've sometimes forgotten where I was running to and kept going only because the running had become its own reward, or its own fear. Chase a thing hard enough and the chase quietly becomes the destination.

Wong Kar-wai made whole films out of that feeling: people spending a lifetime reaching for something that was never going to come, beautiful exactly because they keep reaching. A dreamy, almost deadly thing. I know it, because sometimes it's mine.

Is that freedom - a self choosing its own motion? Or a trap with the door left open? I can't tell. Two ways to fail sit on either side of me like cliffs: the one so in love with running that he arrives nowhere, and the one who sprints so hard he burns out before the top. There's no answer key.

So I've stopped trying to close the question. Some questions aren't meant to be closed; they're meant to be lived in, like a house. You can't have everything - you set one thing down to pick another up - and what you set down depends on what you actually want, and how much you're willing to lose for it. There's a line I keep turning over: 大梦归离, the great dream comes home and lets go. Maybe that's all growing up is: learning which dreams to carry to the end, and which to thank and release.

We came to that café to turn a man into a number, and he wouldn't let us. He stayed ambiguous - not quite free, not quite trapped, not a success or a failure, just himself, and unfinished, and fine with it. We never did fix his business. So one night we filled it instead: music, karaoke, every table loud and warm, and for three hours the machine served life instead of demanding it. It was the least optimized thing we did all summer. It was the only thing that mattered.

The End.