Walking

 When I used to live in this city, a million years ago now, I walked everywhere.  We all did.  A big family of walkers, we were.  We were not well off, and the one car we had was for my father to get to work in.  This meant that for most of my youngest years if anyone who wasn't Dad wanted to get anywhere, we walked.  Why didn't we take the bus? I have no idea.

I try to patch together these memories sometimes.  At one point there was a school bus. It must have been during middle school, because I went to that school for two years.  I know I walked to elementary school.  I rode the city bus to high school.  It must have been middle school.  But why didn't the school bus stop at my house?  I remember it stopped instead near the elementary school, which was a 15-20 minute walk away.  A funding issue, maybe? Things were different then.

But we walked.  We walked around the old road turned into a trail.  One end had that patch of fossils.  Along the trail were wild grape vines and Mum would collect them for jelly.  My sister and I would walk along the circle path and there was the time we found a huge head of black elderberries and brought them home.  Sometimes we'd find puffball mushrooms in the grass and bring them to Mum to cook.  Much less frequently there might be morels.  She took us to the schoolyard to climb the Rowan trees.  Why were we getting that fruit? I can't remember now.

These were daily walks, not unusual ones.  Our legs were strong and this is what we did.  If we needed groceries we put on backpacks and walked 45 minutes to the store and then home.  If we had a doctor's appointment, or needed new socks, or wanted to get out of the house or be alone with a friend or a boyfriend, we walked.  There weren't places to necessarily walk TO, but we walked.

And then I went to university.  I was even poorer.  I also had fewer places to go, so there was less walking.  I finished school and came home.  My walking had slowed at this point and mostly what I did was ride the bus. Over the years it has waxed and waned.  The small Eastern Canadian town we lived in had no bus. We lived in a slum apartment on one end of town and all of the shopping was at the other end, so we walked.  We walked pushing a stroller, carrying a baby, with all of our groceries, in all weather.  We had no car, so we walked.

The 8 years we spent in Northern Ontario were in a tiny village, and there wasn't really anything to walk to.  We both got out of the habit - now we HAD to drive everywhere.  We grew lazy and plump and more middle class than we'd been before.  

And then the move back to the city where it all began.  

When I started at the first job, I had to walk again.  Up and down the stairs at work, back and forth to the train station many times a day. It was hard to get back into the long-disused habit.  I wore compression socks to help the swelling, reminded myself all day to sit up straight and tighten my abdomen to strengthen my core.  At night, before sleeping,  I lay in bed and wrapped a cord around my foot and carefully stretched out my hamstrings.  It took almost a year to get back in the habit of walking.

After 18 months, I moved on from that first job to another one, closer to the apartment and with better pay.  I walked.  I walked up and down the four flights of stairs to the offices, back and forth to the bus stops again, playing the old mental games I would play in high school: can I beat the bus to the next stop? Can I make it to that street over there in X amount of time?

This story isn't going anywhere, much like my walks, but it just feels good to regain this part if my childhood again.  It's one of the things I missed most about living in a city.  Suddenly, there's somewhere to go to again

Apologists. I guess.

So. Hi.

I'm not dead and I've been thinking about writing again for a while,  and then I saw THIS little nugget pop up on my Facebook feed and, well, IT SEEMED TIMELY.   (Also my friend Jenny is slogging through dealing with the racism rampant in college applications and I feel like fighting.  Here we are.)

I really hate the above conversation for so many reasons but I also kinda feel like I need to pick the reasons apart to fully understand them so welcome to our program today.  

1) The question is "regardless of your worldview, what safeguards do you put in place to ensure you embrace TRUTH rather than what you want to be true?"

I like this question! It has its problems, sure - it's treading pretty close to the idea of truth being a relative concept, 'live your own truth' sort of thing.  Which, I feel like hopefully we are maybe moving away from this as a society a bit?  But I can overlook that and try to read the question as I think it was intended.  Namely, taking away the first part entirely and rephrasing the second part to read "what do you do to ensure that you remain open-minded about the things in your life that matter most to you?"

And THAT'S a GREAT question.  As I have told every faith-curious individual I've come across, God is not afraid of your questions.  Ask them!  Ask the stupid ones and the hard ones and the ones you've asked a dozen times already! Sometimes,  you'll even get answers! Hah.

And I think of this question as so perfect for all of us, regardless of our faiths or jobs or lifestyles.  Hey, that thing you really believe is true? Can it stand up to scrutiny? What if I showed you this other thing over here and it was also very compelling but gave an entirely different answer?

Now we get to the response.  Acknowledging that there are unknowns in the world is important, and certainly it's true that any one human cannot know the sum of all knowledge and furthermore humanity as a whole possesses such a small sliver of what it's possible to know in the grand scheme of creation.  Absolutely accurate. 

Not really RELEVANT to the question though, eh? How do you make sure you're keeping an open mind, Jim? Well, I remember that it is impossible to know everything.   Okay, but it IS possible to know MANY things and if someone has an opinion or fact about a topic and presents it to you...this implies that this is something it's possible TO KNOW ABOUT.  Yes? I mean, it says 'worldview ' right in the question.  We're not arguing about if there are microbes on a planet we haven't discovered yet.  If someone is adamantly defending that topic they are, excuse me, but probably unhinged.  MOST people have OPINIONS about such topics but they aren't using those as utter, undeniable truth - we're talking about your worldview,  the things you believe act as a user manual for who you ARE as a HUMAN.  The things you firmly believe are the TRUTH.  So, yes, obviously it must BE POSSIBLE for you to believe they are true and know they are true if, in fact, you have done both of those things!!!! Ipso facto and what have you.

But sure, okay, that's one way to look at it I guess.  If I can overlook the imperfect wording of the question then I suppose I can rephrase the first answer.  Let's go with:

"What do you do to ensure that you remain open-minded about the things in your life that matter most to you?"

"Well, firstly I try to remember that I don't know everything. I stay humble."

Better? But the second part is possibly even more aggravating.  "I accept there are, currently, some things I believe that are not true."

I think it's safe to say that I do not intentionally believe ANYTHING that is not true.  On some things, I disagree with others.  Absolutely.  I'm not a big dessert fan, for example.  My husband LOVES gummy candies.  That man would eat an entire bag of gummy candies and not think it was too sweet.  We have a difference of opinion. It's not POSSIBLE to know the truth about whether eating an entire bag of gummy candies is 'too sweet' because the idea of 'too sweet' is completely relative.  Likewise, I like to think that on a distant planet there might be microbes, and maybe you don't like to think that.  It's not actually possible for us to know for a fact whether either of us is correct and there are microbes on Planet X. That's okay! It's not a knowable fact so we can both have our ideas and back them up with whatever we like.

But to ACTIVELY believe something that it is possible to know the truth about and which you do know the truth about and yet you cling to the lie is...mentally ill.  It's some sort of strange trauma survival response or possibly a psychotic episode of some type.  If you are presented with the facts, and you look at the facts and say 'I don't agree with those facts' then fine.  Then you're wrong, maybe delusional, but fine.  No one can force you to believe something.  Ask the flat earth society.

But if you are presented with the facts and you say 'upon careful consideration, yes, actually, this is not true.  I recognize this is false and a lie. But I'm going to make a conscious choice to continue believing it because I want to.' Then you are having An Episode Of Some Type.

Again, this is not an opinion question.  This isn't a question that's asking what you do to ensure that you have lots of opinions and you can shift them around.  Because opinions are a dime a dozen- I have different views on the same subject depending what week of the month it is, for heavens sake!

No, this question is asking about The Truth.  It's asking how we keep striving to learn in more detail exactly what is true.  Not what we WANT to be true, but what IS ACTUALLY TRUE.  I want lots of things to be true.  I really reaaaally want them to be true.  But they aren't.  So I can acknowledge that they aren't true and keep holding on to the things that are true despite my own wants, while always holding truth up to the harsh light of each new idea that comes along, or I can be convinced by a new idea and decide it is actually true, but I simply cannot be SANE and acknowledge that something is undeniably true, but that I am going to advocate for the lie.

I'd also just like to point out that the bracketed text is insulting as hell.  What on earth?! Christians are rarely taught to think this way? What way? Discerningly? Intelligently?  Let's just brush aside a few thousand years of the church academic shall we? Come over to my theology library and look me in the face while you tell me I'm not thinking critically.  I dare ya.