96. I Don't Like It But I Think That It's True (And Thus There To Be Lived, To Be Interacted With)

(Epistemic status: Painfully well-tested. For anyone who's ever had to navigate a reality they wished were different.) 

"What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived." Eugene Gendlin said that, and I find myself turning it over and over in my head, especially lately. It's not because I like it - though I do - but because it's one of those chewy crystallized chunks of insight you can gnaw on forever and keep getting nourishing juice out, like some kind of  everlasting candied ginger of rationality. It cuts straight to the heart of how to stay oriented when something important about the world is so much worse than you wished it were.

The operant phrase there is "interacted with". Not "observed", not "waited out", not "endured", and certainly not "wished away" or "denied", "interacted with". Engaged with, navigated, used as the actual terrain for making plans and moves in those plans. There's a bandage-ripping sort of pain to the proverbial owning up to that badness, especially if you do it right, and there's a strange and tragic flavor of suffering that comes from refusing to. You believe something painful about the world, about the people in it, or even about yourself; you've done your fieldwork and shuffled around your probability mass this way and that, and you trust the evidence of your eyes and the workings of your mind well enough. But you can't quite bring yourself to take that belief seriously. Maybe you even take actions that plausibly act on that belief  - you make plans that seem to try to account for it, you navigate as thought it might be real. But you don't do any of it like it matters; you take stabs at courses of action without really treating them, or that painful belief, like they really matter. So you're torn between two stances: one where you know the thing, and another where you're trying really hard to deny the thing and refuse to let that knowledge change anything real. You make plans for a fantasy world slightly but notably misaligned with the real world, and you thrash or are paralyzed as the world as it is goes on around you.

Let's pause here to name a few things that aren't the same as this owning up to the badness, this shoving your face directly into and feasting on the pain of reality. It's not cynicism - you're not just expecting the worst, forever, as a defensive crouch of learned helplessness. It's not giving up, either - you're not shedding your agency and indeed you're enabling it; you're not becoming passive except in letting the winds of observations blow your view of reality to and fro. It's not even radical acceptance, either, that soft exhausted landing into "it is what it is"; it shouldn't be what it is and you know that full well and that fact burns inside you. It's something both more difficult and more specific: seeing clearly what's actually there, even when you hate it; and then using that clear sight to identify the real moves available to you. Indeed, it's especially when you hate seeing clearly what's really there when it's most important to. There's a mental blocker here a little like bed gravity; the abstract knowledge that you could do something, held back by the bone-deep inclination to put that off until never. It's the difference between "I refuse to see this", "I see this but can't change it", and "this is the actual terrain for me to navigate". 

Grief is the clearest example of this I know. When someone dies, or a relationship ends, or an opportunity closes to you forever, there's an exhaustingly disquieting span of time where part of you knows it's over, but much of you keeps on reaching for what was there. That reaching is natural; you don't stop wanting something because it's gone, and you aren't going to change that habit overnight. But it costs you. Every plan you make that assumes that the person is still there, every habit you maintain that no longer serves, every resource you spend on a cause already lost - those are all moves made in the wrong world. Working the fish-hook free hurts. Pushing it deeper first to get the barb out, feeling it cut on the way, watching the vision of what-could-have-been fade as your burn it - that's real pain. But once it's out, you can finally make moves in the world as it really is, untethered.

For a somewhat lighter example - lead, meet neutronium - consider operating under degraded conditions without realizing it, without admitting it to yourself. Maybe you've been running on insufficient sleep, or inadequate support, or degraded resources for so long that it all just feels normal. Malnourished, you nonetheless compare your output to people in ideal conditions and wonder what's wrong with you; why you're falling short, never thinking to account for the weights you've been carrying. Seeing that clearly - accepting that you're operating in a degraded state and that this is what that means for what you can actually do - doesn't make the conditions better. But at least it lets you stop beating yourself up for failing to perform as though you weren't underprovisioned, and it frees you up to plan around your actual constraints, rather than the ones you wish you had.

This distinction keeps on showing up: wishful thinking costs you agency, because you keep making plans for a world you're not in. Denial costs you agency because you can't navigate around the obstacles that you refuse to see. Both of them leave you less able to act effectively in the world as it really is. But unless you open your eyes and see clearly, whatever the cost in pain, you'll never find the real paths, narrow that they are. A documented paper trail when dealing with someone unreliable, no matter the logistical and social cost. A backup plan when you quietly admit to yourself that you can't count on Plan A. A refundable fare you book, even though it costs you more, because you aren't sure whether a beautiful commitment will hold. Adjusting your expectations lower and lower yet when you're operating under constraints that shouldn't be there, but all the same - are.

I hate that I need to do this. I wish reality were better in obvious easy ways, that people were better in obvious easy ways, that systems were better in obvious easy ways. I wish that seeing clearly didn't so reliably mean bearing witness to so many things that hurt. But wishing doesn't make a thing so; ripping bandages from off of your eyes may hurt, but wandering into traffic and being run over will hurt far more. For the pain of knowing unpleasant truths is that pain that tells you you're still alive. Still oriented, still making relevant moves, still taking what you see seriously and letting it move you.

That's the practice: See clearly. Feel free to hate and mourn what you see if you must. And then - navigate anyway. You can stand the horrible things that you have seen, for you are already enduring them. So quit closing your eyes.