I read a book years ago, decades maybe, by this name.  Oprah told me to and so I did.  For a long time I read everything she said I should.  I don’t remember many details of the story at the moment, other than that it was a story told within a story…and I loved the idea; two totally different tales being told at the same time…and this morning, I was watching my new friend Joel Osteen and tearing up from his message, as I know as truly as a day is long that it was a message for my new friend to hear, and really HEAR, not just listen to, and it got me to thinking about how life and love and relationships are truly stories within stories, being told at the same time, and with totally different views and details and “truths,” ergo, totally different but yet the same.

Remember that slumber party game called Telephone?  One girl starts a story and then we whisper it to each other down the row of sleeping bags and strewn blankets and bodies and when it gets to the last girl she says aloud what she has just been whispered…and it is NEVER what was started and FREQUENTLY something different in words and concept than the start.  Life is like that in a way, at least for me right now…I hear stories and I hear explanations and none of them are ever what I hear when I go right to the source.  What I know is true is what I hear when it comes from the mouth of the man I now love.  I can listen and pay attention as is my nature to what others tell me and what others tell me from what they heard and from what others tell me from what they heard from others who knew somebody who knew somebody…but nothing carries as much weight or value to me as what I hear from the mouth of the man with whom I now share my life.  That much I know is true.  What matters is the truth that comes from him.

I have struggled for years with trying to make others see that EVERYTHING is about perception and pretty much nothing more.  How I perceive an event or a statement is my own, regardless of the action or concept, it is how my brain processes the information that matters…just like your brain and your perception will process YOUR way…we base everything on our own lives, pasts, wishes, damages, celebrations, successes, and failures.  All we do when we hear things is use our own wealth of knowledge to process and make an assessment…I know this much is true.  What you tell me and what somebody else tells me can all be valid and can all carry some truth and perhaps some embellishment but the fact of it all is that no matter what I am told, and no matter from what source, ALL that I hear still gets processed by my brain and filtered by my framework and perceptions and so all truth becomes “something else” the minute it goes from one brain to another.

That is just a fact that I see as a truth in my life right now.  I can only make my choices and my decisions based on what I hear and know and discover as it then filters through my own beliefs, judgments, philosophies, and understandings…my perception of how things are and who people are is still the ultimate filter because what anybody does or says has to do with only them, nothing to do with me.  I am in love with a man who for some reason everybody wants to tell me a story about…I am done listening.  I am going to only hear the stories that come from him…events and what led up to them, how he handled them and how he didn’t.  Much like many of the events of my past…many people who knew me during the darkest days of my life surely have an opinion and have heard things about what happened to me  and around  me but only I know what is true, what the story within the story is.  How we act towards one another in EVERY situation is our own choice.  I know this much is true.