What I know to be true
What I know to be true is that I needed to zoom this google doc to 125% to comfortably see the words I’m typing. I need to hold packages and bottles under lamps and near windows to read the instructions. What I know to be true is that I didn’t take a certain way home last night, driving in the dark, because I could not say for sure where exactly to enter the intersection.
What I know to be true is that there is a light gray streak in my hair, and I love it. And that I bought two pairs of reading glasses at the dollar store but never use them—not out of vanity, but simply because it still works to hold the thing under the light, or far away from my face, or to zoom in on the text (if zooming is an option).
What I know to be true is that no matter how enlightened we become we are still in human bodies, and now I get what the Buddhists talk about when they state, over and over again, that we are going to get sick, and die, and lose everything.
Add to that list mistakes. We are going to make them. Even after learning the lessons. We’re going to, as a dear friend puts it, “step in it,” again and again. We’re going to watch ourselves with disbelief. How on earth did it happen again? Especially given how much I know, given how much it hurts?
Add to that list disharmony, unfinished business. Add to that list hatred and greed and all those very human tendencies that none of us—no matter who we are—are above.
Add to that list fear: the root of everything we don’t like about ourselves.
I am human, I will fear. I may not be consumed by it every day. In fact in most moments I actually may be bigger than it—may attach myself to the love, to the joy, that I know is the actual truth. Still, it will sneak out from behind corners in the evening hours. It will stalk me when I am dehydrated, or overcommitted, and it will brush me with its little fingers of worry, pelt me with tiny flashes of terror. It’ll make me want to solve things using my little human mind: the one that thinks it can singlehandedly battle fear, instead of reaching for a truer, realer source.
What I know to be true is that I will not escape any of this. Five decades on this earth—in this meat suit, this bone ship—have made that abundantly clear.
What I also know, though, is that there is endless room for my soul to spread out here, get bigger, understand more, and giggle when I do the human things, and greet it all with equanimity, and accept the mission I assigned myself in the time before memory, in the time of clear sight, way back before my vision started to blur.
