Salut! It’s Flo again. This one is about Karl Popper, and the small, strange way he changed how I try to know things — including what I think I know about pain.

My husband is the one who handed me Karl Popper. I don’t think he knew, when he did it, that he was handing me a different way of holding nearly everything.

Here is the part that got me. When we want to trust a belief, most of us go looking for evidence that it’s true. We collect the times we were right. We notice what fits. Popper thought this was almost exactly backwards. You can gather a thousand confirmations and still be wrong, he said, because confirmation is easy — if you want to find it, you always will.

There’s an old example people use to explain him. Say your belief is that all swans are white. You can spend your whole life counting white swans, and every one of them feels like proof. But no number of white swans ever makes the belief safe. A single black swan undoes the whole thing. So the honest way to hold a belief isn’t to defend it. It’s to go looking for the black swan — to hunt for the one thing that would prove you wrong, and to trust the belief a little more only because you looked and didn’t find it.

It changed the question I ask. I used to ask, quietly, what shows me I’m right? Now I try to ask the harder one: what would show me I’m wrong — and take me closer to a truth that is more true to me? What I’ve learned from Popper, too, is that I should never completely trust a thought I can’t challenge.

I’ve found myself carrying that question into the room with people coping with chronic pain.

Because pain comes with beliefs, and they rarely announce themselves as beliefs. They arrive dressed as plain facts. My back is fragile. If I do that, I’ll pay for it for days. This is just how my body is now. Nothing will ever help. Some of these were handed over years ago, by a scan, by a specialist, by one bad experience that taught hard and fast. They’ve been counted and recounted like white swans. And every flare that follows feels like one more proof.

But notice what a belief like nothing will ever help actually does. It takes the good hour and calls it luck. It takes the morning that hurts less and calls it a fluke, or a setup for something worse. There is no day that it would accept as evidence against itself. Popper had a word for a belief built that way — unfalsifiable — and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. A belief that nothing could ever disprove isn’t strong. It’s a sealed room. It only feels like knowledge because it has made itself impossible to argue with.

So a lot of what I think therapy might be is slower and stranger than fixing. It’s taking one of these beliefs down off the shelf and turning it to the light together. Not to attack it — some of it is true, some of it is hard-won and protective — but to ask the Popper question. What would it take to find this wrong? And then the tender, frightening part: actually going to look.

I find myself wondering, out loud, in this small corner. What belief about your body have you never once tried to break? If you went looking for the black swan — one hour, one day, one small piece of evidence against your own worst theory — are you sure you’d want to find it? And what would it ask of you if you did?

Maybe healing has less to do with arriving at the right belief and more to do with holding every belief loosely enough that the truth can still surprise you.

I don’t know. But I’d rather keep looking than keep counting white swans.

Flo