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Today's
Meditation:
This
is a lesson that took me a very long time to learn.
I always used to be pretty convinced by facts that my
perspective was true and valid, but I came to learn that
there almost always is more to the picture than I actually
can see. And once I realize that truth, then I know
that my judgment of any given situation is necessarily
flawed, and that my feeling of being "right"
about something is based on incomplete information.
A
classic example of this type of problem is the spouse who
seems to be sneaking around, doing things discreetly,
having strange conversations of the phone in very low
tones, then hanging up when the husband or wife comes into
the room. The other spouse, of course, uses his or
her powers of deduction to add up the facts-- and the facts
point to some sort of illicit behavior. Later on,
they find out that the spouse was simply planning a
surprise party, not sleeping around or having an
affair. In a case like this, the facts do not point
to the truth at all, and many people have lost their peace
of mind agonizing over what they think the facts mean,
never trying to find out the actual truth.
Likewise,
someone making a rude comment to me can get me upset
because the fact is quite obvious: this person made
a rude comment. However, the truth of the matter
isn't as simple as "this is a rude
person." I can't know what's going on in the
person's life that might have caused him or her to make
such a comment. Perhaps they've just lost a job, or
their spouse is leaving them, or their daughter has just
run away from home.
Facts
aren't necessarily truth. When we learn this lesson,
we find out much about life, and we learn what it means to
say that we can't really know someone else unless we walk
a mile in their shoes. Yes, the facts seem to be
pointing somewhere, but are they really pointing to the
truth?
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