What would be the chances?

Aug 10, 2025 by Anita Beckman

(approximately 4 minute read)

When I was five years old, in the school yard, a friend boasted to me that she knew everything in the world - absolutely everything!
I wrinkled up my nose at her vast knowledge.
Then I shouted, “That’s not possible… Dummy!”

One funny five year old to another. Words and responses billowing from their little beings, unfettered.

Nowadays when people insist they are in one, true position, it still seems illogical to me.

Why presume that one is right all of the time? What would be the chances?

Just because we tell ourselves something, doesn’t make it the “truth”.
Words do not make a thing so.
Isn’t it more likely that we only have a grasp of a portion of what is going on?

And what has this to do with salad servers?

Well, nothing actually, other than I am sitting here, and I am supposed to be promoting our business, focusing on marketing and selling, and my mind wanders to the nature of being two faced.
This both to do with the nature of selling, and the design of our salad servers- Those Two.

Two faces, gently smiling. Are they two friends? Or a double? Happily, it is impossible to know.

I return to my musings.

To be a hypocrite these days, and even worse, to be seen as one, is regarded as the worst kind of sin.
If you catch someone out, pin them down in the moment of undermining something they once said, some contradiction, it seems that you have got at some vital truth.

But what truth is it, where did you get to?

The idea that you can only either be winning or losing makes us crazy to be on the side of winning, and certain of it.

But knowing everything, and always being right, is surely for five year olds.

Not knowing everything, is for adults. Hypocrisy, in its most gentle and unknowing form, is for adults. Being two faced, in order to (sometimes) grease the social wheels and enable a situation to flow, is for adults.

Facing contradiction, not as a wishy washy place, but as a humbling and powerful reckoning, is for adults.

Why wouldn’t we want that?

Perhaps hypocrisy is not the end of the world.

We may try as hard as we like to remain true and pure, in a place with no shadows or folds or cracks, but the more real position, is to be some kind of hypocrite.
(How can you realistically trust someone who declares themselves to be free of contradiction?)

And further, as the world of advancing technology steers us towards seductive but unsettling convenience, and the promise super efficiency, what do we have to resist the depressive flattening?

Other than with multiplicity.

The idea of doubles within us, surely, is what we should be most glad of, given that it is a sign of time passing, and of a rich and layered life. Our hypocrisies, our complexities, even our embrace of the process of ageing, that most foreign land.

I like the joke where an elderly lady goes to her doctor, and after examining her for some time he proclaims in a deliberate tone, “I can prescribe you this and that but Mrs Jones, I’m afraid I can’t make you any younger.”
To which she exclaims, “Younger! But I don’t want you to make me younger Doctor, I want you to make me older!!”

And with that thought in mind, let us return to serving salad. (Why not?)

Instructions for using ‘Those Two’ salad servers:

Grasp opposing salad servers in your two hands.

Aim a cheeky smile at the unknowable doubles within yourself.

And serve away…