DAY 40) "You Can't Handle The Truth!"

Jack Somebody is unprepared to divulge. After all, how far can one go into the forest? The actuality of life is such that few of our moments are complete. Only facts are. Yesterday there was a cockroach on the kitchen counter. Yes, yesterday. What time? I’m not sure. But I could swear it’s not the first one I've seen; and so forth. Meeting truth half-way is then to commence leaving it again. We seldom tell nothing but the truth, the whole truth, and then fold down our hand. It’s a practice to keep things up the sleeve.

M’Lady Nancy loves to read these essays. Sometimes she offers commentary, examination, exploration, but other times she just thanks me. Depends on the subject matter, I suppose. We have spoken several times about the Toltec wisdom inherent in The Four Agreements. We are agreed; not taking things personally is most difficult indeed! And now that today for me marks that epochal 40^th day, I find myself indeed half way into this busy forest of being here, and have a sense of now heading out. Friday to a Friday, five exact weeks ago I entered. And today we looked at the calendar; exactly five weeks to go and I shall be leaving on a Friday too. Magic. The mathematical fact of winning or losing days across time-zones of travel eludes me, somewhat; it’s enough that I am here, doing what I do, now! Tomorrow will bring what it does, particularly by virtue of today. But life is best not expected to be expected, or even fair. There be many a truth concealed in anyone’s pages that would illuminate our histories.

What others want to know and what is right and proper for them to know are different things. We come to honour Caesar, not to bury him. Grandchildren and great-great grandchildren are to be protected. It is only when we are sufficiently removed from our ancestry that we find a great-great-great old cardinal sinner of ours to be amusing, quirky, or a quaint old devil. Were you the seventh generation of Jean Valjean would you not take pride in his having been 24601? But what of his daughter? He was so ashamed of having been a convict that he could barely get to tell her of his past, even after all the years of a parent’s love between them. We are afraid of truth, since we can hardly gauge the other’s reaction. And we do take things personally. Few want to be told their house needs cleaning.  Few want to be told untruths; one feels cuckolded, deceived, not honoured, not trusted! But when M’Lady once did divulge a secret, way back, her erstwhile friend got surprisingly snobbish about it all. It ruined their relationship.

Matthew has problems with trusting people. In 7:6 he makes of the pearls of truth something easily to be trampled. He was of course not the Father of Situational Ethics. No, that slippery slope began when Adam first asked Eve what she was hiding behind her back. Probably. But then again, what is truth? We perpetuate Easter bunnies and Tooth Fairies and Santa Claus. We use phrases like “there’s nothing better than...”.  And we know instinctively that children ought not to hear some words, some things, or where we hide the cookies. Concealing things is often done for the sake of protecting others, or ourselves. Our experience shows that the consequences to truth are simply sometimes not worth it.   

M’Lady’s Memoir was completed today. By her! She handwrote the last of her pages. Now she has no more blank spaces to face. She gets to edit the typed manuscript, alter and make new commentary to the existing pages, and find alternatives to some of the choices we made for illustration, or for ways to conceal other’s truths. Thing is, we came to honour the dead, not to exhume them and to reveal their clutched up imprecision.  A man is all things. Women too.  And unless we accept that we be as accepting as possible with the fact that facts need to remain hidden, to protect others let alone ourselves, we shall truly find ourselves very harmful indeed. The Memoir will become history. And history rewrites itself.