“I live my truth.” That’s a phrase I hadn’t heard much through most of my life. Now it’s a familiar refrain, part of a modern storm of redefinition, an obsession to erase and replace old meanings, old beliefs, beliefs now disparaged as if they didn’t forge the reality our lives are currently built upon, as if the suffering of the past didn’t pave the way for the ease of the present, the ease that allows people the luxury of redefining because they are now removed from immediate consequences of death and decay.
When did “my truth” become “the truth”? And if I’ve already attained “my truth” is there any reason to keep developing or is it enough to shout from the rooftops, “This is what I am! This is all I’ll ever be! I solemnly vow today never to become more than this. I have spoken and will hear no more.”
It seems to me that the value of truth wasn’t ever in the attaining of it. It was in the pursuing of it. Truth was a concept, an intangible goal worth seeking, a belief that answers were possible, that if a person desired strongly enough to uncover a modicum of light, a way would eventually appear to allow that light to manifest. Truth was about hope that the bleakness of the world wasn’t indomitable and wasn’t forever, that vigor and pure intention could eventually transform chaos and darkness into beauty and understanding. Truth made even the meanest life a potentially worthy battle with direction and purpose in its struggle, a forward march through the gathering darkness, a terrible slog with a grand promise of inevitable release from our degradation in this strange and hostile world, a promise that maybe, just maybe, we are something more, that there are levels to us yet undiscovered, places beyond fleshy gratification, places of strange powers where light blows away the chaff of our souls and leaves behind the perfect gleaming gems.
It seems strange to me this idea has fallen out of fashion.
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