Wednesday Wonderings

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Oscar WildeIrish poet, novelist, dramatist and critic, 1854-1900

I seldom question what I hear anymore. Why? I guess that I have become jaded. It seems that truth is relative to the moment. Most folks are not compulsive liars so you can pretty much accept that what they tell you they think is the truth. I used to think that I was a truth speaker. I was pretty adamant that what you see is what you get. Until, an interesting incident which involved my Grandson Quinn who was 8 at the time.


Quinn was asking me why his great grandmother (my ex-husband's mother) hated me so much. I just quickly answered without thinking: Because I tell the truth. Quinn, with all the sincerity and honesty that only 8 year old can have asked me: But, which truth Grandmother Myriam?


Talk about having your breath taken away and your mind spinning in a new direction, well that has had me thinking ever since he said it. I have come to realize that I do primarily speak the truth but it is based upon how I see it or feel it or hear it. It may have nothing to do with pure, unadulterated facts. I smile as I remember Joe Friday, the TV detective in the original Dragnet: Just the facts, maim. Just the facts.


A lot of us mix up truth and facts. All truth is not factual. And all facts do not necessarily reflect the truth. And, memory is the biggest liar of all. I remember what I want to remember but I am not a clear recording of reality any more than history is a truth but only the reflections by a victor.


If we recorded our lives purely as fact, the color that creates our reality would be lost. When we tell our stories we are always telling those stories based upon all the events that happened up till we stored that memory and all the events and feelings that followed that memory. We are able to create a credibility to our memories by storing details that seem pretty irrefutable. However, every mothers child is perfect 20 years later.


There is something really powerful about the malability of memory and truth. That which was too awful to be remembered can be reframed to make it tolerable. That which was to boring to bother with can be dramatists to make it more exciting. Many issues that we face in our adulthood have to do with remembering the past in a negative manner. Or, it might even be from remembering the past in a positive manner. I am usually one who opts for possitivity when I have a choice but when rose-colored views of the past interfere with the now, one needs to take off the glasses and see more clearly.


To deal with the death of my father when I was eleven, I created an image of the perfect father. Unfortunately few men could compare with the perfect memory I had invented as a part of my life story. Therefore I would choose men who were probably good men in many ways but there was no way possible that they would ever be able to compare with my ideal. In learning to have a good relationship, I had to become more realistic about the imperfections of humans. While I still keep tucked away in my heart the memories of being my father's little princess, as an adult I don't need to be a princess, I prefer to be a goddess. Talks with my mother in her last years enabled me to clarify the reality of my father. I became aware that he was good, bad, ugly and sometimes beautiful. Now I can have relationships with people, not just men, who are flawed but still divinely perfect at their center.

They say the truth can set you free, sometime the truth can only entrap you into repeating the patterns of the past and the history that is only an approximation of what was reality.

Imagine the possibilities: http://manifestreality.com/possibilities