Trust30 – #28 – Hard Words

Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writing is one of the ways I figure out what I'm thinking, and while I haven't been doing a lot of it here (or in my fiction projects), I have been doing quite a bit of it in other, more private venues. And it's been fascinating, on one hand, to get to the bottom of some issues that go right to the core of who I am and what I think. It was this Trust30 challenge that I'm horribly late on that got me started down this road and I'm grateful for what I've learned through the process. And at the same time it's been hard and a part of me wishes that I'd never started.

I've got 5,000 words and growing sitting in a document that is just an attempt to get really crystal clear on who I am and what I think about some things. There are some things in there that are scary. There are things in there that have been painful and emotionally raw. There are some things in there that I recognize intellectually as being incorrect, but there's a part of me that thinks of them as being absolutely right.

Which is part of the point. Rhetoric, in its original form – before it became mere sophistry – was thought of as an exploration of and a quest for truth. As I write, I believe that I get closer to capital-T Truth. If I'm being honest, if I'm really listening to myself, and I'm really listening to that voice inside me that prompts me to do the good but hard things, then I'm moving closer to truth. Our understanding of truth is limited by our limited comprehension and our limited experience, but as we grow and develop and honestly seek for it, our understanding and appreciation of truth grows naturally. Just as if we refuse to look honestly at and seek for truth, our understanding and appreciation of it diminishes over time – growing dimmer and dimmer as time goes by. We recognize that truth with our physical bodies, and our intellectual and dare I say spiritual selves abide by the same principles.

So. I may say some things today that I would not have agreed with a week ago, a year ago, ten years ago, because I have changed. Not necessarily for better or worse, although that's unquestionably an axis I move along. And as I change, as my perspective shifts, my understanding of Truth changes also. Not to say that Truth changes – merely that our understanding of it and our ability to apply it shifts as our experience with it changes – as we become more or less able to "handle the truth".

As soon as I saw "Hard Words" in the quote above, it made an instant association in my mind. In the Book of Mormon, there's several references to hard words. I've talked briefly about the path and the rod and the tree. That same man who had that vision had multiple occasions to speak hard truths. Immediately after he explained the vision of the path and the rod and the tree to his brothers, we get this exchange in 1st Nephi 16 1-2.

And now it came to pass that after I, Nephi, had made an end of speaking to my brethren, behold they said unto me: Thou hast declared unto us hard things, more than we are able to bear.

And it came to pass that I said unto them that I knew that I had spoken hard things against the wicked, according to the truth; and the righteous have I justified, and testified that they should be lifted up at the last day; wherefore, the guilty taketh the truth to be hard, for it cutteth them to the very center.

It's one of the most apt descriptions of what I've been going through for the last few weeks. The words I'm writing to myself have been cutting. And hard. Hard as iron. But they've also been necessary. Some time in the future, I need to pull that apart and really dig into it. Suffice to say I've been thinking a lot about my favorite of the Chronicles of Narnia – Voyage of the Dawn Treader – and about my favorite character. Eustace Scrubb. I can suddenly empathize with that character in new and ever more interesting ways.

As I've said in the past, in order for us to chart a course forward to where we WANT to be, it's necessary at some point to come to an understanding of where we ARE. And once we know that, we can determine what we need to do, how we need to prepare, and the course we need to take. And that's true of any endeavor – be it business, family, personal, spiritual, intellectual, professional, etc. And as we learn the hard truths, as we speak and internalize the hard words, eventually, they become less hard – because we're living according to those principles I talked about last post. They become edifying.

And that's something to look forward to and work towards, no matter what the endeavor is.

Let me say something else. Mad Poet Files was always intended to be a place where I would post my own fiction. That eventually this would become the place where I started applying Tracy Hickman's Dickensian methods to serialized fiction. And I still want to drive that way. But one of the hard truths I have to accept is that I have gotten SO busy that I have not allowed myself time to write. And I don't believe that my writing is where it needs to be for me to really make a go of it.

Dagnabit.