Have you heard the verse "the truth will make you free"?
Have you wondered why it hasn't made you feel free from your anxiety and negative thoughts yet?
I'm going to share the secret about truth that the people in charge never wanted us to know.
Why Some Truths Create Anxiety
Our white American society was built on hiding and avoiding the truth of slavery. We enslaved human beings to hoard, build, and generate wealth for ourselves, and we excluded everybody else from it, even the people who actually did the building. We did that for 400 years. How many generations do you think happen in 400 years?
What do you think that many years of hiding and avoiding the visible truth does to a society? What happens when we shrink all of that down into our daily lives? The fact that we don't know how to celebrate truth is chilling, but it also explains a lot about why we suffer so much anxiety and negative thinking.
Love Celebrates Truth
At the beginning of what became The Hart Habits, I came across the phrase "love celebrates truth." I had to sit with the word celebrate. What do we actually do when we celebrate something? We put it on a stage. We shine light on it. We put up billboards. We make a big deal. We highlight the good in it. We take the time to notice it, and pay attention to it.
Objective Truth vs. Subjective Truth
I like to talk about two kinds of truth: objective and subjective.
Objective truths are the ones we'd generally agree on as a group, usually based on facts, data, evidence, and statistics. The speed of light. The sky is blue. The grass is green. In reality, though, there are very few completely objective truths. Most things become subjective the moment we receive and process them for ourselves.
Subjective truths are the ones subject to our personal interpretation. They come through our eyes, ears, and senses, get processed by our brain, and are interpreted by our heart, soul, or spirit as true. I've talked before about the Reticular Activating System, and how the brain can lie to us to keep our reality matching what we expect. If you want fun, concrete examples of this, watch Brain Games on National Geographic.
Here's a subjective truth: I think I'm a tall woman. I'm five foot eight, which is tall compared to a lot of women. I'm often one of the taller women in a room. But if I'm standing next to a girlfriend who's six foot seven, she might look at me and think, you are not tall, you're small. That's true for both of us. It's true for me that I'm tall, because in most rooms I'm looking over people's heads. It's also true for her that I'm small.
How can I be both tall and small at the same time? Subjective truth. The truth has to come through my filter first, and through hers. Both are still true, even though they conflict.
The Plurality of Truth
You could search this as duality of truth, but I like to call it the plurality of truth, because every truth has more than two ways of looking at it. It's not just my way and their way. There are many different perspectives on any given situation.
Think about the four Gospels. Same story, four different people, different times, different perspectives, different messages. They tell the same story in different ways, and all of them are still true (according to believers), just shaped by whoever is telling it.
Here's the Point
Even when someone's truth is the opposite of yours, love celebrates truth. When you let other people hold their truth and choose to celebrate it instead of fighting it, everything works better.
That's their truth. You're not going to change it. Trying to is what's causing you the anxiety and negative thinking. Instead: shine a light on it. Pay attention to it. Highlight it. Understand it. Make your own decisions with it in mind.
You're free now. You get your freedom from letting them have their truth. You don't have to change them. You don't have to change their mind. You don't have to persuade anyone toward a different point of view. You're here to experience your own perspective and enjoy it as fully as possible, in service of your highest purpose. Gratitude helps with that.
What This Opens Up
Their truth being different from yours isn't a problem. When you can look at it honestly and celebrate it, meaning really pay attention to it, there are real benefits. You get to make better, more informed decisions about how you move forward, what you do or don't do, what your boundaries are, what Spirit is telling you, what your shadow or inner child wants, and how your strengths play into all of it.
You might notice that's the four components of the first Hart Habit, Self, the ones I walked through in the last several posts of this series. Truth is number two on the list instead of number one for a reason. You have to know yourself, love yourself, and embrace your own subjective truths before you can really embrace what other people believe is true too.
Soon, you'll get to a place where you can hold someone else's truth as true for them, and worth celebrating, simply because you want to live a life aligned with love. You'll make better decisions about how you move forward with people, and you'll find yourself more open-minded, more able to hold all the different truths, good, bad, and ugly, that exist in the connections and Spirit around you.
Recommended resources:
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
The Reticular Activating System
Brain Games (National Geographic)
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Question of the day: What truths are you avoiding, hiding, or trying to hide from? What would it look like to celebrate them instead?