How does truth become profound?
This post will help you use TREE more effectively
Time and tumbling.
You know that thing where you experience meaning at a deeply profound level, then you try to write it down or tell someone and it sounds trite and cliche? It’s like the depth and meaning sit within you and refuse to stick to the words you’re sending out.
If the meaning struggles to travel with the words, how does it come to exist inside you in the first place?
The words need time tumbling around your brain with other words and feelings.
Here’s an example: All you need is love.
St John the Beloved said so a long time ago. St John of Liverpool said so more recently.
A few times I’ve experienced a sense of oneness and universal connection. During those times I knew beyond words that all we need is love.
In 2012 Christine and I went for adoption training. We learned that ‘love is not enough’. You need actual specialist skills to be an adoptive parent. I understood that. It made sense. I worked to learn the skills.
So all you need is love, except when love is not enough.
Zip ahead a few years to a small child so full of screaming rage she’s spent the last hour trying to destroy everything and everyone around her. I’m hot and angry and exhausted and out of ideas. When it’s all over I can’t just go home because it’s happening at home. Repeat that a few times a week.
I start to know in my bones that the specialist skills have got to be sitting on top of some really fierce love. It’s the kind of love that keeps going when your kid smears poo on her bedroom wall (only happened twice) and tries to bite chunks out of you (happened a lot more than twice). It’s the kind of love that makes you keep trying. It drives to you get skills and keep getting skills until something works.
When you have that love, it’s all you need. And now ‘all you need is love’ sits in me with more richness and depth than five words could ever convey.
Here’s another, less dramatic, example.
Years ago, I saw an animated version of this Ira Glass quote about the gap between taste and skill when a person is beginning to learn a creative skill.
The idea of the gap between a beginner’s taste and their ability stuck with me. It spent a lot of time tumbling around my brain. I shared it with a number of people.
Last year, I saw this graph:
All of a sudden Glass’ quote and stuff about beginner’s mind and years of creative experience fit together beautifully. I understood that the gap is not just a beginner thing. It’s a whole life thing. It is the process of creativity.
The graph opened an insight into creative life that is more profound in me than the image conveys. And it happened because of time and tumbling.
How does truth become profound?
Time and tumbling.
Profound truth is slow.
Did you like this post? Get more like it (but shorter and with weird drawings) in your inbox every weekday morning.