Who switched the rice

A woman in Muscat bought one kind of rice for twenty years and would have argued about it with anyone.

Then she spent a few weeks cooking in her sister's kitchen, where the cupboard held a different bag. She did not choose it. It was simply what was there. She cooked with it because there was nothing else, ate it most days, and by the time she came home her own rice tasted slightly wrong to her.

The next time she was in the supermarket, she reached past the old bag for the new one, and when her husband asked, she said she had decided to switch.

She had not, really. Not in the way the word suggests. Nobody sat her down with a better argument. No advert won her over. What happened was quieter. She cared enough about food to keep cooking it carefully, and a few weeks of doing that with something new changed what her hands and her tongue expected. Only afterwards did the deciding part of her arrive, look at what had already happened, and sign its name to it.

Most changes of mind seem to work like this. We picture ourselves weighing evidence and choosing. More often we are exposed to something, repeatedly, and it rearranges us before we notice, and then we tell the story as though it were a decision.

Which means the brave part is not the deciding. It is being willing to put yourself near the experience at all: the other kitchen, the unfamiliar bag, the thing you were sure you would not like.

The mind changes first. The person finds out later and calls it a choice.