The Truth Takes Time

I collapsed on his white carpet, sweaty from a morning of walking miles in the city sun. I was too hot to do anything else. He approached me with a cold, damp washcloth, which he progressively put on my neck and my back and my legs while I giggled incredulously. He noticed when it got warm and refreshed it with cold water. He washed my feet with it. He brought me cold grapefruit and refilled my water glass when it started getting low. These are facts from years ago. He made me feel more beautiful and amazing than probably anyone else ever has in my life. That's a fact, too. A more relevant and contemporary fact is that this relationship was incredibly unhealthy and it needed to end. This last fact is supported by countless other factual vignettes, darker and deeper, separated from the washcloth in space and time by months or just hours, that are beyond the scope of this post.

I've been reflecting lately that a true statement doesn't exist in isolation. Reality is too large. One sentence can be true, but it cannot be 100 sentences; in each true sentence, 99 facets of fact are absent. "The truth takes time." "The years teach much that the days never know." "A single story is dangerous." A story or truth is on some level misleading if it not properly contextualized. A wise woman I look up to once pointed out, "Until you are in a relationship with anyone, you judge poorly who they are and what they represent."

I came across this idea again in an article sent to me by a friend, titled "How the Invention of the Alphabet Usurped Female Power in Society and Sparked the Rise of Patriarchy in Human Culture." Very worth reading. TL;DR: the alphabet and its resulting communications are direct/pointed, linear, analytical. These in contrast to image, which is simultaneous and holistic in its presentation of ideas. Men's thinking tending toward the former traits and women's toward the latter, women were disadvantaged when literacy arose and became the primary way to organize human thought/truths at a societal level. A pull-out quote: "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse," --Sophocles. This morning I came back to that thought in my own words and decided that's why we have the expression, "it seems too good to be true." I thought of all the new products and foods that have come out in the past few decades and their promises of a more convenient life. They certainly delivered on that promise, but a generation of thinking people have begun to ask, "at what cost?" and intentionally return to slower, messier living for the piles of fringe benefits it brings. Examples: home cooking, making your own [yogurt, almondmilk, bread, etc.], growing gardens, cloth diapers, simple homemade cleaning supplies, etc. Of course I don't want to abolish literacy (I feel like subtracting literacy from it would literally ruin my life), and neither does the author of the article, by any means, but its reminded me to remember the bigger picture.

Reality always contains both shadow and light, so if something looks perfect upfront, your only safe assumption is that you don't yet know it in full. This goes for products as well as people. My story is longer than the first nine sentences of this post, though they could seem to paint a complete picture of a relationship (and I used to think they did). I try to remind myself the whole story whenever I'm tempted to tell only half, calling myself back from the edge when I villainize either of us. A true story can be a long story. It can have lots of sides. The truth takes patience.