I always believed there was a Truth.
And I knew I didn’t have it.
It was out there somewhere. Distant. Elusive. Illusory.
But I could never quite grasp it. Just when I felt I had it
close enough so I could reach out and apprehend it, it mysteriously moved,
shifted, kind of slipped away, beyond me... and my grasp... again.
For lack of a better term, I defined Truth as God. Much of
my culture did that, so that fit my parameters too: distant... elusive...
illusory... God. Didn’t matter: big ‘G’ or little ‘g’.
And Truth for me was definitely removed and remote, up
there somewhere, above the clouds of confusion and ignorance and unknowing,
but...
I figured, if I could just find that one first truth, one I
could simply count on as absolute truth, then... like building with stones, that first truth would lead me
to a second,
and then connect with a third, and... as I fit them together,
building layer upon layer, they would not only stand, but eventually one day
reach up and lift me above those hindersome clouds to where I would finally and
triumphantly proclaim, ‘I made it, God! Aren’t you proud of me?’
All the while, however, I was oblivious to that still
gaping gulf between us; not the vertical gulf, for in my mind I had already
bridged that, but the horizontal one, the chasm my self had created, the one
still looming between G(g)od and me. So intent on realizing my own personal
truth, I had unwittingly created my own personal god: ME!
It’s hard to be god, especially all the time! You’ve got to
be perfect and for humans, that demands a lot of work and striving to: meet
impossible standards, realize impossible dreams, and self-fulfill your own
prophecies.
I tried for a lot of years. Tried real hard. I suspected
truth realization might have something to do with character, so I tried all the
harder. But some days, after I had purposefully turned over a new leaf just
that very morning, no one noticed by noon just what a great guy I had instantly
become! That was hard to take! People can be so disappointing!
Don’t know why I was wired this way exactly, but all my
pictures in elementary school had mountains in them and I don’t think it was
just because I lived in British Columbia. I think it had more to do with trying
to ‘Climb every mountain; ford every stream!’
Something like The Sound of Music meets Mission
Impossible in my blood, urging me ever onward and upward to make the
impossible possible.
Reach the unreachable; attain the unattainable.
Deceptive idealism.
Much of my spiritual journey seemed to end up with me often
falling into creeks by that name. They were not only messy, slippery
experiences, but most of all, embarrassing.
Self has to keep up appearances for a lot of ego and it
doesn’t like to apologize for what it is not.
Unfortunately, I still seem to encounter some of these same
waters at times and when you stay too long and wallow, they become, as for all
pilgrims of truth, Sloughs of Despond.
And I really did fashion myself a pilgrim, or maybe even a
Don Quixote on some formidable quest, forsaking the familiar, turning my back
on the status quo to deliberately seek out the exotic unknown, that which could
not + would not be nailed down and put in a box...like a coffin.
Or more to my way of thinking, I fancied myself a traveler.
Never a tourist.
God forbid! (now who was my god again?) I would never be as
crass, lame, nor unforgivably stupid as those tourists: you know, the ones who
rent the taxis or go on city tours in double-decker buses with the driver-guide
cracking the same old tired jokes he/she’s worked over every trip for the last
twenty years?
Same old, same old.
Routine, routine, rut rut routine.
I prided myself that I was able to smell them a mile away
and run even further in the opposite direction.
Tourists were not truth-seekers. Tourists never truly know
where they are or where they’ve been. I used to ridicule them as poring over
their cache of vaguely familiar photos when they got home, the ones they
snapped through streaked bus windows while still driving.
‘Funny? why do all these pictures have that same dirt
smudge in them!?’
I remember when I was once in Lisbon, Portugal, ‘traveling’
through the Alfama: the former Arab section of the city and oldest district not
destroyed by the devastating 18th Century earthquake. Original buildings from
over 600 years ago; a still working-class fishermen neighbourhood among narrow,
twisting streets and alleys barely wide enough for donkeys to pass.
Sounded interesting... so I went to see it for myself.
While exploring its maze of old shops, houses and
marketplaces, I heard a sudden commotion up the street ahead of me and looked
up just in time to see one of Lisbon’s unique green-and-black taxis screech to
an abrupt stop. Its rear passenger window rolled down.
A camera poked its eye out like a spying U-Boat's
periscope, intruding on the medieval scene below.
Then one ‘Click!’ and the interloper receded, back into the
anonymous black hole from where it had come. And just as quickly as it had
arrived, the taxi sped off again, its window still rolling up with its human
cargo anxiously anticipating their next exciting destination.
I stood there, taken aback by the superficiality of what I
had just witnessed.
I imagined what bland existence lurked behind that camera
incognito.
And then a humorous scenario occurred to me:
Fast Forward to possibly 1 week later, back home in
America, where I pictured
‘Fred + Martha’ looking over the photos of their recent
quickie European tour.
‘So where’s this one from, Martha? I can’t remember where this
was? Looks like some kind of fish market. Disgusting! Look at the way they just
lay them out on the street! Probably France. Or was that Spain? They both
looked the same. Or... wasn’t there another country in there too? What was it
called? Something like.... Portyoucall? Do you remember? Were we there?...
Are you even sure these are our pictures?’
Some people spend their lives like they tour
countries: ‘If it’s Tuesday, this must be Belgium!’
And then, after they’ve returned home and they’re left only
with memories, they have no clear recollection of where they’ve been and how it
relates to their present picture.
In retrospect, however, I was more like
that very tourist I mocked than I ever realized.
Essentially, I was a tourist in my own life: looking for
truth, but rolling down my window only enough to poke my opinion out,
ignorantly taking the moment’s snapshot, and then, like a tortoise, withdrawing
once again into my self-centred darkness; anticipating the later joy of more
photographs of places, people and experiences, but never able to appreciate
their moments of truth while I was actually there.
And so I kept seeking and stumbling.
One day I stumbled on these lines from T.S. Eliot, a fellow
truth-seeker:
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all
our exploring
Will be to arrive
where we started
And know the place
for the first time.’ (Little Gidding)
But.... I wondered,
Where is that place, that first place, the first knowledge, that first stone I can count on....
the truth?’
Where is that place, that first place, the first knowledge, that first stone I can count on....
the truth?’
