The Frigid Waters of Truth

The summer I turned nine I read at least one Harlequin romance novel a day, curled up in a tiger-striped beanbag chair in our living room in the Oregon countryside and dreaming of the day I’d get out and see the world.

If you’ve ever read one of those Harlequin romances, you’ll know that they’re full of dark handsome strangers and exotic locations. Greek millionaires sequestering English-Rose heroines on their private islands. That kind of thing.

Obviously, in reading hundreds of those novels at age nine, I was working something out in my head – something about life and how I wanted to live mine, and about relationships between women and men. I think I decided (because even at age nine I knew that life was unlikely to work out so neatly) that men came in two versions: adventurous and charming, or stable and trustworthy and somewhat dull.

So I grew up and went out into the world, just as I’d planned. And I lived in some exotic places, and met some handsome strangers.

And then one day, early last week, I started to think about how, in these last years of working in emergencies in places like Chad and Pakistan and Haiti, I’ve been running into a lot of men who are adventurous and charming, but who haven’t always been particularly stable and trustworthy.

And I started to think about how I, along with most of the other people I know who’ve spent time working in emergencies, sometimes operate in a sort of “emergency mode,” even when I’m not in an emergency.

I started to wonder how I measure up myself, when it comes to that old “adventurous vs. stable” question. And I started to be drawn to getting the real story behind things, rather than choosing to imagine how things might or might not be. Something about stability meaning facing up to the truth, even when that truth might not be what I’d wish.

This week has been about diving into the “frigid waters of truth,” as my friend Joe calls it. I wrote to a colleague asking for the email of the blog editor for a major psychology website (scary and truth-facing because I’d love to have this blog posted there but am aware that its style may not mesh). I suggested to another that we consider the possibility of bringing nonviolent communication to Kosovo; I asked a writing professor, who told me years ago that some of my ideas were good and others were “inane,” about working with him again; I asked a man who was checking out my bum for his opinion, “no sugar-coating.” (Only another person who shares my admitted obsession with this topic can understand how scary THAT was!).

On Friday, I was in another city. Since coming back to the US, I’ve found myself moving around a lot and seeking distraction. I was leafing through a book at a yoga studio and saw a quote: Something sage and, well, yogic about how we only come home to ourselves when we slow down and stay in one place.

“That’s it,” I thought. “That’s the scary thing for tomorrow: stay in one place and really look at the areas in my life where I’m running away from that more stable side of myself.”

Ironically, I got my car stuck on a muddy, sloping driveway when I drove home that night and was unable to drive anywhere until this afternoon. So I’ve had every opportunity to “come home to myself” for the past two days. Be careful what you wish for, eh?

I did it, though. I made a list of the things I’ve been avoiding, those things that are necessary but not a whole lot of fun (taxes, travel claims for my last job in India, cleaning out the car…), and started working on it.

When I warned Joe that “Frigid Waters of Truth” might end up being the title of my blog post today, he replied:

“Actually, I have found the waters of truth to run tepid and lukewarm in comparison to the heat of exaggerated dread and the chill of the undone.”

Maybe it’s not about being stable or adventurous, but instead about having the courage to be real – the courage to really look truth in the eye.