When I was little, six or seven, I would take apart my toys. Remote control helicopters, toy cars, those cards that talk. I wanted to know how everything worked. I’m relentlessly curious. My mom always did her very best to entertain my curiosity, and my dad, to his credit, never got mad at me breaking the toys he’d buy me. Putting things back together was a skill that came later. My mom raised me on the Science and Discovery channels, Mythbusters and How It’s Made. We went to the Maker Faires and talked to construction workers. My dad and I talked about technology and the Internet and how the economy worked, with a healthy bit of skepticism.

On our daily walk to get coffee when I was perhaps five years old, we stopped to watch some construction. A worker hopped out of the back hoe (my favorite Caterpillar vehicle at the time) and handed me two N95 dust masks, like the one he was wearing. I was so excited.

My curiosity with how the world worked only grew as I grew older. I was always researching something. I loved learning. In high school, I started taking the Muni train and bus to school. I’d walk a couple blocks in the cool, damp morning fog whisked up from the Pacific to the train, take it two stops to Forest Hill, and transfer to the 43 Masonic, a bus I would later name my online presence after. Quickly, I realized if I boarded at the front door of the front car, I could watch the train operator drive the train, raise the steps, transition it to automatic operation in the tunnel, and control the doors. I became fascinated. I had to know how it worked.

But I couldn’t. I was no longer the cute five year old who loves back-hoes. Now I was a snot-nosed teenager with voice cracks and too many questions. I began to suppress the wonder.

I met Jay some time in 2022, at his bike shop in the foggy Inner Richmond. I was seventeen or eighteen, in my last year of high school. I had a shitty ebike I had started commuting to high school on. I went, having heard about it on Twitter. He told me my bike sucked, showed me why, and talked me through what he was doing while he adjusted my brakes. Never had someone so clearly an expert at what they do cared to let me in on what they were doing. The curiosity I’d learned to ignore came roaring back.

I started spending time around the bike shop, and Jay, sensing I needed it, took me in. I would bike over every lunch break, and spend every weekend I could at the shop. I was lovingly called “shop rat”, and it quickly became a second home to me.

Jay is one of the wisest, kindest people I know. He’s full of knowledge. As the years went on, Jay’s stories and thoughts changed my life. Nothing had a great impact than a conversation we had while working at the shop a couple years ago. We were talking about opinions. Jay is someone who clearly feels things strongly. He has strong opinions, loves hard, and doesn’t shy away from hard things. But he is also so open. To change, to new ideas, to learning from listening and from doing. I’ve never seen someone who can believe something with all their heart, and then change it when confronted with new information.

I don’t know if I came up with the wording, or if Jay did, or if a friend here in New York did after the fact, but the idea I learned from Jay.

“Strong opinions, loosely held” means that you should feel things strongly, but be unafraid and willing to change them. If you think something is a good idea, let it burn hot, and—not but— be ready to extinguish it and move on if presented with evidence it isn’t so great after all. The answer to uncertainty is not apathy, it is willingness to change, a commitment to openness. Fire and flexibility.

The promise I make to the world is that I will try to feel things strongly while accepting that I may need to change those things to get closer to the truth. I choose to feel my emotions strongly while accepting they aren’t always going to be correct. I’ll stand by my beliefs while constantly tuning and tweaking them toward what I believe to be correct.

Instead of being indignant and stubborn in my opinions or afraid of having them for fear of being wrong, I will live and feel life with all the fire in my heart, and I will embrace change. Because commitment and flexibility are not opposites.

I will rage against the darkness and love with all my might and through it all I will try to be true, to my philosophical axioms—which go something like this: we should protect the earth, and fascism is bad—, to my friends, to my communities, to the world, to myself.

And so I’ll write and I’ll read and I’ll shout and I’ll weep and I’ll listen and I’ll learn and grow and I will not deprive myself of a life lived enjoying the fullness of the human experience. I’ll say yes to hard things and no to things that suck and I’ll throw myself at every thing but be unafraid to run into or out of any situation. I’ll burn hot and loud and thoughtfully and with love and rage and joy until I am extinguished.