When I was in my early 20’s a girl I liked invited me to go camping with her and her family. I had just returned from Vietnam, and I told her, “Thanks for asking, but I think I’ve had enough camping to last me a lifetime.
“But this isn’t real camping,” she assured me. “We have a nice little cabin up near Donner Lake. Come on, it’ll be fun. Plus, my father really wants to meet you.”
“He does?” I asked with surprise.
“You’re going to have to meet my dad sooner or later,” she said, obviously reading the panic on my face. “This’ll be the perfect way to get it over with.”
“I guess you’re right,” I finally said. “Is he a pretty easy person to talk to?”
She smiled, took my sweaty hand into hers and said, “I’m afraid he’s a college philosophy professor. You should be prepared to think BIG.”
“What’s that mean?” I asked her with concern.
“Just that my dad is full of hot air and thinks he has the answers to all of the world’s problems.” She smiled even wider and added, “Hey, come to think of it, you two ought to get along just great, huh?”
And so, we did until darkness blanketed my second night at the mountain-top cabin and my girlfriend’s father suggested that he and I go out and look up at the numerous constellations he could identify. “So, Daryl, what do you think about when you look up at all these stars on a clear night like this?” he suddenly asked me.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I finally managed to reply. “How the universe got started and stuff like that I guess.”
“Well,” he said, looking directly at me, almost through me, “when I look up into the sky on an incredible night like this, I think about how everything we believe in is usually 180 degrees from what it seems.”
“Really?” I said, trying to buy myself some thinking time to figure out what he was talking about.
“That’s right,” he explained, “the truth is almost always the exact opposite of what we think it is. Now you think about that when you get some time. It’s a great thing to learn at an early age.”
He also went on to explain the yin and yang in Chinese cosmology and a number of other interesting concepts which went over my head, but later that night, as I tried to fall asleep on a sagging couch which had seen much better days, I couldn’t get his little theory that the truth is rarely what we think it is out of my mind. As I kept endlessly flipping the beliefs (he had called them barriers) which confined my life on their backside, it finally dawned on me that the man wasn’t nuts at all, and that what he had said was actually an insight worth remembering.
Anyway, although his daughter and I stopped dating soon thereafter and I never really got a chance to talk to him at any great length again, I still recall that little starry-night chat with appreciation from time to time. I also often find myself bumping into the truth, or at least what I believe the truth to be, just where he said I would find it, about 180 degrees from where it’s supposed to be. And here are just a few old assumptions of mine which have turned out to be pretty much the exact opposite of what I once believed them to be:
That if you put enough time and effort into raising your children, they will all turn out exactly the way you want.
That the more money you earn, the more you’ll be able to save.
That one has to love rarely to love well.
That we can tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of the world.
That one can actually improve the educational experience of young men and women by getting elected to a school board.
That those who make big profits know how to profit from them.
That the politics of nations are shaped by men with ideals and nobility.
That a man or woman who has become conscious of the absurd will someday be free of it.
That the world will not kill the very good, the very gentle, and the very brave impartially.
That there is no victory in lost causes.
That there is sun without shadow, and it’s not essential to know the night.
That we can know beauty without being intimate with suffering.
That the decadence of our era is different from that of others.
That when you act, you risk more.
And that we will have the good fortune in our lives to meet, love, and disappoint only exceptional beings.