One day, when I was little, I was with my father in the bathroom while he was doing his daily grooming. Being the didactic father that he was, he wanted to teach me about all the right things to do in the world. He told me that, after removing the accumulated hair from the hairbrush, it was very important that I should never put it in the waste bin. There, it could too easily catch on fire and he urged me always to flush it down the toilet.

On a separate occasion, when I was with my mother in the bathroom during the daily grooming, I was told by her (being the didactic mother that she was) that I should never put hair in the toilet because it clogged the pipes. She urged that I should always use the waste bin.

In later years, when I began doing household chores on a regular basis, my father told me always to vacuum before dusting because the vacuum kicked-up dust onto the furniture. Of course, mother told me that I should always wipe the dust before vacuuming, because dust fell to the floor when wiped. (This should give you some insight as to what went wrong with me, but I digress.)

Their truths were perfectly logical and reasonable to them, even though they were conflicting in practice when applied by another. Since that time, I have learned that the best truth evolves from oneself. Truth is too relative to circumstance to leave its cultivation to someone regarded as “authority”, uninspected. We don’t always have that luxury as children, to inspect our authorities for truth, but we’ve all put on enough years now that we can be our own authors of truth. Maybe it is time for a reinspection. It’s OK to dump in the round file, or flush down the porcelain convenience, things that you have been told in the past. Even everything, if you find that it is not in actual fact producing results for you in the present. Because the truth is, our truths are how we shape this world.