To know the truth, one has to be willing to know the truth. However, we often don’t even know that we don’t know the truth. It is very easy to become stuck in our own cave, like that of Plato, and not to see the world around us. How can we find the real truth when we already think what we know now is the truth? We must at some point come to terms with the fact that what we think we know might not actually be the truth. One must realize, and accept that fact.
There was this one particular girl in my high school that I just could not get along with for a very long time. She was also Japanese like me, but much more physically attractive and smarter than I was. Regardless, even with her attractive appearance and the number of friends she had, there were some people who did not like to be around her. Those were the people who happened to be my friends. High school was all about who we did or didn’t like. The more I heard rumors about her from those people, the more I disliked her. Once someone had told me she that said she didn’t like me either. Now I was my own slave who did not know the truth but only rumors about her bad reputations from other people. To my shame, those rumors became the truth in my mind and I felt like I knew all about her.
However, I started wondering if she was actually the evil person that my friends described to me. Rather, it was my ego that wanted her to be the evil person that I built up in my mind. I was the vicious one who was so envious of everything she had; her skinny long legs, big cute smile, and good friends whom adored her all. All the things I thought I knew about her were in actuality only what I wanted to believe to be true.
If I wanted to know the truth about her, I had to get rid of all the insecurities, shadows, I had. I feared knowing the real truth and the possibility that I could ruin relationships I had with my friends if I found out the truth. I had to do it, and risk of losing my friends. The truth was what I was looking for, not my friends’ reputations. Life is about taking risks and having the courage to do so, and standing up for one’s personal moral code. There are some things one cannot gain without taking risks. Sometimes someone gives us an opportunity to see an entirely new world, one which we never had imagined.
Eventually I spoke to her. We began to know and learn about each other little by little. I cannot describe how embarrassed I felt when I found out something I thought it was true, actually wasn’t. As I expected, there were some friends who did not like that I became friends with her. They just didn’t realize that what they thought to be the truth actually wasn’t. They in a sense will be stuck in their own cave until they realize it. I did not even bother trying to tell them the truth. I knew that they had to want to find out the truth on their own.
One segment of your blog that particularly caught my attention was your reflection that to see your friend in a true way (in her "true light") you needed to resolve your own personal insecurities and biases. I think that this is one of the major steps everyone has to take in forming authentic and healthy friendships and relationships, in which we're meeting people on their level and as they really are, rather than through our own filters and projections.
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering what personal steps enable us to see someone truly. You mentioned talking to and getting to know your friend directly, rather than forming a judgment of her based on how other friends describer her to you. What led you to reach out to her in the way that you did? Part of it was a personal process (a subjective one), and another part was an objective one (relating to someone on their own level), and it could be enlightening for you to detail what critical thinking enabled you to clear your mind both of preconceptions and of anxieties in the way that you did.
There are a couple great movies about relating to others "on the level" -- whether that be the dynamics of a "true friendship", extending oneself and reaching out, or overcoming the shadows of either rumor or insecurity. This is a central theme of one of my all-time movies, "Dream with the Fishes". "Breakfast Club" is another great movie exploring all of these themes, and "Stranger Than Fiction" and "Shawshank Redemption" also come to mind. Let me know if you'd like to discuss any of these movies, or if you have any questions about their connections to Plato. Good work here!
Very true! It is very hard for someone to find the truth on their own. I can relate this to one of the quotes about truth.
ReplyDelete“Beware of the half truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half.”
A lie can be accepted as truth. For example; the things your friends told you about that girls who you didn't like, those things were not true. I find that lies can be possible even if the facts are not there to support the false statement. It can be very easy to begin a false statement and by having people conduct that statement it might become to a point where people believe it is true, like you did.