I was very amused the other day by a tweet. It was accompanied by a photo of the alley of San Ginés which, if you know Madrid, you will recognize by its famous century-old churrería/chocolatería, and by the small and coquettish incunabula bookstore at the beginning of it, on the corner of Arenal street. In the photo you could see that they had placed a sign in the middle of the alley in order to separate the lines that people formed to go to one place or another. The sign clearly and precisely indicated with two arrows the two rows: on one side, churros, on the other, books. The text accompanying the tweet read: I refuse to choose.

Since I was a child, I have always been very fond of two fields that are even more separate and opposed than books and churros: books and soccer. I always had to hide one of my hobbies from both. It was important to separate both worlds, because either you could look like a pedant if you started talking about Georges Perec in the middle of a corner, or the opposite if at the end of a poetry recital you commented on the great goal scored by Messi. Until I discovered writers like Galeano or Nick Hornby who said that you could like both things, and one did not discredit the other. 

And that's how we are: contradictory. At first it is hard to recognize it, but that is until you assume that you are neither one thing nor the other: you are both. And many more. That you like La isla de las tentaciones as much as a Susan Sontang essay, going to a classical music concert as much as going to a karaoke to sing out of tune, living like this is to die of love, eating at a Michelin star restaurant as much as having a tortilla ration in a neighborhood bar with sawdust on the floor. To be in the metaverse with a blanket over your knees.  

Javier Gomá said in one of his worldly philosophical stories, as he himself defines them, that: "I remember people telling me: "You can't have everything; you have to choose" and now I am in a position to answer people and answer myself with a powerful voice: "No, I don't want to choose. I want everything! " (...) The great and the small, drunkenness and routine, passion and happiness, pleasure and virtue, vulgarity and exemplarity, vocation and profession, this life and the other, height and weight, gravity and grace, naivety and lucidity, experience and hope, height and depth, north, south, east and west, including, as I read somewhere, the 'body' and the 'gun'". 

We are Darwin and we are Verne. We are imagination and we are science. We are what we dream and we are what we tell. We are pure contradiction. And even though sometimes it seems like we have to choose between mom and dad, we love them both. I refuse to choose.