This Much I Know Is True
On June 14, 2017 I started my 36th trip around the sun. A part of me lacks acceptance that the stealth teenager and vivid dreamer within who my ego identifies itself with is confined to an early middle-aged, creaky-boned body. My sensible self knows that the spiritual axiom “Let go or be dragged” is a more realistic sentiment and so it is with that passage that I am embracing myself as a seeker and learning to let go of delusion and absolutism. I am a student in this Earth School and I am ripe with the epiphany that most of “becoming” is a matter of “unbecoming.”
For the vast majority of my life I have possessed a thirst for knowledge and information. I have compiled a neuropathic hodge podge of random and meaningless facts. I am usually able to double down at a trivia table and answer obscure questions. I have defined myself by what I know. Or what I thought I knew.
I grew up in a rural community. My roots run thick with working class chutzpah. Intelligence and the amount of subjects that I learned to speak to throughout my life have given me a false sense of security. When I examine those words in print, my cheeks get hot with embarrassment, but it was my truth. It was a shallow truth, but nonetheless, mine.
And then I woke the fuck up. Awareness. Uncomfortable awareness of who I had designed myself to be in a world where we are taught to package and mold ourselves to the standards of a society designed to be vacuous and narcissistic. I bought it hook, line, and sinker. My package was shiny. Polished with fine clothes, a culinary repertoire worthy of a Georgia debutante, and a taste for finer things that I could not afford nor had any business trying to afford. Freshly highlighted hair, fake diamond studs, and a second hand designer purse. My heart and soul were starving to be heard. They had fleeting moments of glory, but my ego earned conductor status on the train to materialism and conformity.
I was jarred awake in a most daunting way when a terrible addiction to painkillers led me to a bottom where the only direction I could look was up and out. Staring into an abyss for answers. I thought I had all of those damn things – the answers. Where did they go? They dissipated into the ether. Gone. A product of all of the “becoming” thirty-two years can handle. In one fell swoop, I unwound and “unbecame” with force. A blow to the ego and the whole body is a simple way to describe sobering up. The acknowledgment that there is a book containing the key to life, but it is the one book I have not a shot in hell of comprehending. I am simply unable to interpret the text for the book on life.
As a freshman at the University of Georgia I became enamored with the literary genius of Wally Lamb. His stories expressed a surreal amount of pain and circumstance. The day I bought his second novel “This Much I Know Is True,” I was completely unaware of the sadness waiting for me in the pages of that book and life itself. At the time, my journey into addiction was lifting its wheels for takeoff. There would be years of chaos, lost jobs, rapid adventures, spontaneous trips, and the constant seeking for something to fill me up. The knowledge dropped in Wally Lamb's book involved the premise that we live a lifetime of thinking we know so much as humans, yet if we are truly blessed, we will live to see a day where all that we think of as truth will crumble away and we will embrace the fact nothing is truly certain. Not even the death and taxes that Baby Boomers like to joke about. Truth is a beautiful word, but it does not pass the acid test of life. I spent the first part of my life looking for the Truth. The one with the capital “T.” In this moment and however many more I breathe in, I will honor the fact that I just don't know. That is as much of the truth that I do know. Namaste. Aho. Blessings.
