What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. . . . Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived [doesn’t exist]. People can stand what is true because they are already enduring it.
— Eugene Gendlin
Sometimes I think about how the closer it gets to my yearly mammogram or skin cancer screening, the more I worry about cancer. As if the test itself is the determining factor and not the cancer. What is true is already so. Either I have cancer or I don’t — it is already so (either way) regardless of the test. And yet . . . I go most of the year not really even thinking about cancer, but as the weeks and days inch closer to these tests, well . . .
There are so many things — even happy ones, unlike cancer — this can apply to. Admitting, acknowledging, accepting anything doesn’t make it so. It was what it was already.
My father-in-law would say he didn’t want to use the online banking feature his brick-and-mortar bank offered because he didn’t want his financial information available and accessible to hackers. I tried to explain that the information is there, online, available and accessible to hackers already, whether he chooses to access it himself or not.
Talk about truth always reminds me of Flannery O’Connor who said, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it . . .” Of course, she is also attributed with saying, “You shall know truth and the truth shall make you odd.” ;)
The truth can be hard to come by these days, but there are also times when it is staring us in the face. We try so hard to look away.
What we forget is that we’re already enduring it.
Might as well keep moving.
xo,
Beth
