The Two Sides of Truth

Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. My feet slapped out the rhythm of the word with every step.  The sky was clear and winter blue, naked spindled fingers of trees raked it as I ran by.  Frosted oxygen pierced my lungs with every panting breath, and my fingers crawled inside my sleeves, curling up against my wrists for warmth.  Bitter blades of passing winds stabbed color into my cheeks and nose – first blush, then pink.  Then icy shades of red.  My toes were slowly numbing inside my shoes.   I’d been running for ten minutes.  It was 32 degrees.

Five kilometers later, my hands swung free from their sleeves, pumping into the home stretch.   Red still splayed across my cheeks, but fire had replaced ice and they burned with exertion.  My toes felt the weight of each step and a trickle of sweat slid down my neck.  The sky was clear and winter blue, half frozen fountains stubbornly spilled barely flowing drips of water over their fallen brothers as I ran by.  It was 32 degrees.

In the span of half an hour, my reality blew hot and cold – literally.  If you had asked me to tell the truth about how I felt at the beginning of my run, I would have honestly answered “cold”.  If you had asked me at the end, I would have honestly answered “hot.”  However, although I had changed, the temperature through which I was running had not – it remained 32 degrees throughout.  One reality (the external temperature) remained constant, while another (my internal perception of the temperature) fluctuated.

Why does it matter?  Because if we’re going to take a long hard look at the possibility of an Ultimate Reality and what makes it up, we have to understand the difference between personal (subjective) reality and impersonal (objective) reality.  Too often I hear people say, “Well, that might be true for you, but it isn’t true for me.” Or, “Perception is reality”.  Others fight back with ideas about Absolute Truth and make grand sweeping generalizations meant to apply to everyone and everything everywhere.  Who is right?

I think they both are. 

The life I’ve known has simply been the succession of one personal experience after another and I believe in the legitimacy of those experiences.  No one has ever seen the world exactly the way that I do, steeped in the family, the upbringing, the culture, and the relationships I have.  I am uniquely me and everything I come across is cast with a certain hue of experience no one else can fully understand.  Others may have lives painted with a similar palette, but the proportions of this to that, or these darkened pigments playing off of those lighter ones cannot possibly be identical to mine.  All realities any of us encounter are slightly tinted with the shades of our own personal perceptions.  This is what makes the idea of fashioning individual serving sizes of truth seem reasonable.

At the same time, all of my very legitimate personal experiences happened in the context of an independent reality.  The sun shone, the trees were leafless, the frozen fountains half-flowed in a land of 32 degrees whether I went running today or not.  All of those realities existed independently of my experience.  Furthermore, anyone who wandered outside today could have encountered the same sun, the same bare trees and the same fountains.  While their perceptions may have been stained slightly darker or lighter or greener than mine, they still bumped up against the same reality I did.  A family-style truth existed which was greater than mere us.

We humans are made of both body and soul, mechanism and mystery, independent reality and personal experience.  An Ultimate Reality must be able to account for it all.   And yet, if each of us is so unique, seeing the world through our own life-colored lenses, how is it possible to discover any sort of supreme commonality?

Whatever is really Real must be large enough to absorb the truth of everything we can discover “out there” and small enough to satisfy the aching universe “in here”, spilling over into every valley of our souls.  If a thing is real to me and real to you, it’s very likely to be real to everyone.  Mankind, for all its many-splendored hues, does actually share the majority of life’s experiences. 

What, then, is Real?  Love is real.  I know for I have loved and been loved, gladly giving, laughing, listening, sharing, and holding on so tightly there were moments we ceased to be two and dissolved into one.  Because of love, I know that loneliness is real. The company of some I so enjoy that it seems the world drops a color when we are apart.  A note is missing from every chord.  The knees of my heart buckle when I think of the time and space between us.  A hundred people could fill a room, a thousand throng around me, and I could still feel as if the only one there. 

Compassion is real.  I’ve seen it with my eyes, felt the blisters of it on my hands.  I’ve watched the sacrifices made in mud, in hospital rooms, in orphanages and gypsy villages.  Sorrow is real and so is joy.  I’ve encountered them on multitudes of lips and eyelashes, sometimes welling up alone, sometimes side by side.  Life is real, and death.  Breathing and talking and eating and walking, singing and sighing and pain.  The world is a kaleidoscope of experience and perhaps if we look at it closely enough, we can discover the spring from which all its colors flow.

32 degrees is the freezing point and the fountains I ran past were straddling the line.  Water had frozen and water still flowed; the dripping diamond-kissed result a glittered work of art.  No matter the shape, however, no matter how rigid or fluid, no matter the weather or the winter blue shade of sky, the substance poised and running over the chiseled stone lips was water. H₂O.  The experience of each drop was ever changing, but its substance remained the same.  Subjective reality.  Objective reality.  The truth lay hot and cold in both.    

"It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."

--C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces