“What does it mean to live in truth?
Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not
dissimulating.” –Milan
Kundera
Which is to say,
that probably a lot of us spend much of our time trying to avoid the truth in our lives
because the truth is powerful, potent and demanding.
The truth often
demands action, making us uncomfortable, threatening our precious status quo
and, by extension, seeming to threaten whatever degree of security and comfort we imagine our dysfunctional lives afford.
We dream we are
risking much to follow the dictates of the truth, so we resist the move into this foreign and unknown territory – it’s scary! And there is no
end to the reasonable sounding rationales we can manufacture in order to avoid the
direction the current is taking us in.
But at the end
of the day, this is a tremendous waste of precious energy that might better be
used to navigate what is ahead. Better, instead, face the truth and summon as much courage, intelligence and wisdom as we can to meet the inherent challenges.
For the truth
will not go away for our refusing to face it. It is what it is and exists
independent of any mental gymnastics to dissimulate it, or wish it something
other than what it is.
There is freedom
in the truth, hard won, but worth the effort. Which is to say: allowing
ourselves to see what there is to be seen and to feel what it is that we really feel, puts us in touch with the actual contents of our lives.
And this,
correspondingly, generates a whole host of interesting possibilities for a more
energized and innervated existence – one amped up with passion, vitality and
gratitude for being alive to experience the whole, big, beautiful, messy
business of it.
What does it
mean to live in truth? Simply put it means being real and cutting the crap. After
that, you can have fun experimenting and playing with the variables.
