I believe it was Aristotle who said, "The Un-examined Life is Not Worth Living." I used to be sure who quotations like these were attributed to. Socrates? Plato? I could look it up in my old files if I were still interested, but I'm not really - not right now anyway. In the past, I may have even corrected my own English and grammar (and yours too if I could get away with it), such as never ending a sentence with a preposition as I did a couple of sentences ago. These days, things like that still catch my eye, but they just don't seem as important. I think it was Walt Whitman that said, "The most important thing about communication is being understood." I'm prepared to take his word for it. (Don't bother correcting me if I'm wrong, and I'll leave the grammar and literature to my sister with the PhD in English).
So, I woke up this morning thinking about the things I told the neurologist over the last week. Most of them are true ... to the best of my knowledge and memory. But can I really be sure? Thoughout our lives, we constantly create stories to explain events that we otherwise cannot easily explain (or just don't know) - to answer questions that need answering - by our friends, our family, acquaintances, and even strangers. I imagine it's been that way for ages. I woke up and hour early and laid there for a while with my mind racing, so I got up, fixed some coffee, and sat down to start this blog.
Just before getting my spinal tap yesterday morning, my Doctor asked me about the book I had been reading while waiting for him to arrive. It was rather thick, an 8 in 1 Web Marketing for Dummies book. He looked at it a second and asked what kind of business I was trying to promote. I told him I was a photographer.
The truth is seldom so simple - for a lot of us, I think.
It's funny how a question as simple as, "What do you do for a living?" can be a stumbling block. My life is apparently yet to be defined, and is constantly changing, as evidenced by recent events, so I haven't really been sure what to say until now.
If we're not as successful or happy as we perceive some of our old friends or classmates to be, we stumble with our answer. If we're not proud of what we do for a living - we lie. And there are always those events that can't be explained without a cover story or without risking embarassment, disbelief or even ridicule. So we may lie about that too - or clam up and internalize it. The problem is, some of these little stories become so real that they can take on a life of their very own, and we can no longer tell the difference ourselves.
Robert Louis Stevenson said this about it, "The cruelest lies are often told in silence". These are the lies we tell ourselves, that keep us down, that hold us back, that separate us from the two most important things in life - love and happiness. I would say success also, but there are so many different types of success, I'll save that for another day.
If we're ever to achieve love and happiness, I believe we must begin by tearing down the walls of self-delusion and knock the legs out from under our false assumptions about ourselves. It's the only way to gain an accurate self-image. It's a lifetime struggle, I know, but the journey has to begin somewhere. Why not here?
Michael
ps. If while reading my blogs, an interesting ad catches your eye (when I get them started), please click through and make a purchase. It will go a long way toward funding my treatment Thanks..
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