What is Truth?


                                       This morning’s doodle


“Well, the truth is . . .” 

“Own your truth . .” 

“That’s not how I remember it . . . Not how it went down . . .” 

“You weren’t there. You don’t know the truth . . .”

Or the wonderfully infamous, “You can’t handle the truth . ..”


When I get into a “he said, she said” argument, I become very competitive about what is the truth of the situation. I want there to be a CCTV recording to prove I am right. I wage an aggressive campaign of Rightness.  

But I have learned that the harder I press my rightness, it means that I know on some level that I am, in truth, not right. What’s driving my certainty is not certainty, but a nagging sense of being in the wrong. Even if there was a CCTV recording that played out the way I said it happened, I would still, on many levels be wrong. I know this.

I’m a good arguer. Way better than Vic. I can argue circles around him and did for years, decades, of our 50+ marriage. After I’d won, I would repeat the argument over and over to myself, assuring myself that I was right and he was wrong. I needed a lot of assurance. 

Now, I’m not saying that Vic was always right, but I am saying that I was never totally right. I spun words so fast and certain at him, because, on a childish level, I’m terrified of being found out as wrong. 

A CCTV recording can’t capture the whole truth. Yet, what it could catch would be—if we had it watching us every day and in all our interactions—be very revealing, and embarrassing.

Years ago, I was upset about something and it really had me going. I was verbally looping and upset and blaming somebody or something—I don’t remember what or who—but I was on a tear. 
Vic finally turned to me and said, “I just wish you could see yourself.”

I am very literally minded and as he spoke a rolling image flashed into my head of myself and my actions and words of the last few minutes. I was teleported behind the camera, watching myself play out my frustration and fears. 

I stopped. The image was so telling, I just stopped. 

I still get heated, I still loop dialogues over and over when I am trying to defend myself to myself, but through the years the idea of a camera watching and listening pops up more and more often and I pause. 

I try to hold my certainly loosely now. And while a camera wouldn’t be able to catch what is typically the real reason I am wrong even when I’m right—bad attitude, unforgiveness, being a jerk, etc—the idea of it makes me stop and slow down, and think, what is the truth here? The whole truth. Why am I reacting so violently? 

I have a catchphrase I use lately: “This is more about me than…” (the person who hurt my feeling or who was legitimately rude or some policy disagreement that turned personal.)

I’m not denying that the person was rude or even factually wrong. I’m simply saying (when I stop and see myself) that my overreaction is more about me and about the journey that I am on. I can’t handle the truth and the onus is on me to do better. 
 





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Story

Image
    It took me two days to finish this sketch because I was on vacation and ran out of ink and had to wait until I got home.  Here’s to good sketching partners like Di. Thank you for sitting with me while I use my imagination today and tomorrow.  All my life I’ve used Story as mother, father, confidant, side kick, brother, sister, best friend, teacher, lover. People ask, “Where would you have been without books in your life?” And I think about the desolation of a childhood without Nello and Patrasche, without Scout Finch, or Bilbo. But, But, but, I would not, even then, have been stripped of Story. Story and the imagination it holds tight to its heart, is, in the words of Ursula Le Guin, “an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.” Even those we might imagine with no imagination, use Story. The gruff farmer looks over his field and imagines when the rain will  come. He remembers past...
Read more
Image
Amsterdam. Recent watercolor.  The Desert Fathers and Mothers, according to Kathleen Norris’s Acedia and Me defined sin as “bad thoughts.” They said that sin, at its source, was a matter of the mind, of skewed thinking. From these bad thoughts came bad actions.  Somewhere along the line bad actions began to edge out bad thoughts in importance. “Well, everyone has bad thoughts,” we say, “you can’t control them, so just concentrate on the actions. Besides, bad thought alone, don’t hurt anyone” And while it is true from a victim’s standpoint, (I would much rather you think bad thoughts about me then physically assault me,) neglecting the inner source of the drive to assault me (bad thoughts of greed, impatience, competition, control, etc) fails to address the human condition at its core, thus cutting off the thinker in this scenario from the only path of rescue. The church as it grew in power both politically and socially, turned the Desert Fathers’s and Mother’s focus from our ...
Read more