I’ve been pondering this week’s @abundance.tribe’s bi-weekly question, What is your hardest truth? since an hour or two after it was posted. My reasoning went round and round for nearly a week. I got very hung up on a couple of things. Question begot questions and I started asking some big ones.
What is a truth? Sounds so simple, as if truth were a hard and fast thing. Is a notion true if it cannot be proven wrong? Is it possible for something to be so very true, that all humans capable of critical thinking would surely agree on its validity? Is there such a thing?
What is meant by hardest? Whenever one hard truth is finally learned, it is no longer quite so hard, and we are on to the next hardest truth to learn.
I got quite stuck.
So I headed over to poetry, a great vehicle to both discover, and express, the inexpressible. But page after page and five days later, I still couldn’t pin down what I was trying to say.
When I enter discussions like this one, I don’t read the other entries before publishing mine, for fear those posts might contaminate my own thinking. But after five days of producing many pages of incoherent ramblings, I decided to check the other entries out. Lo and behold, many of them skirted the concept I had been struggling so hard to know.
Here’s a little compilation of those posts:
@merit.ahama - I am responsible for my own life
@kennyskitchen - It's all on me. I am responsible for my experience
@tezmel - The hardest truth is you are you and your life is yours
Finally, @trucklife-family published her thoughts on the question and, while her hardest truth was not what I was trying to write about, one short sentence in her post summarized my concept almost perfectly the only way to really know the truth, is to feel it
To me, these posts presented one common thread - we ultimately can only discern truth from falsehood deep in our own blood.
Alrighty the deadline to this contest is very soon. I have to publish these musings. How best to bring inchoate understandings to a conclusion?
Poetry of course.
Yesterday I went back to all the poetry I’d written earlier in the week. I easily pulled out three bits that almost said what I was trying to say.
The simplest things
are the most difficult to understand
The hardest truths
are too simple to tell
Look for the simple in all things
we are distracted to think think think
or we won’t know know know
truths that have been crafted for us
not by us
all we need to do
is be still and think from our Selves
Slavery -
influences from outside the self
are false for any self
money as a factor in any decision
leads to a false decision
all that I have been taught is false
all that I innately know is true
The hardest truth
is that truth can not be told
A week of deep pondering finally paid off this morning.
My hardest truth hit me hard when I awoke with a clear childhood memory of my sense of self: I believed I had no opinions of my own, that I was incapable of telling good from bad, right from wrong. I believed that I had to learn truth from others, not from myself.
That there is a hard truth to swallow - that for years I had no connection to the many truths that I alone could feel.
I hope this makes sense to someone out there. If you're spending time in Oracle Girl's bandwidth, you might be better able to understand.
Thank you so much for reading. The image is mine.