Challenging beliefs

Joy got me out of the house.

Maybe I could have gotten out on my own. Maybe not. But it was better this way. It is always good to have friends who throw rocks at your window and make you come out and play when you'd rather not.

I've known Joy for 13 years. In grad school, in the boarding house we shared, Joy was the person on the other side of the wall. I heard her conversations through the cardboard-thin partition, and she heard mine. We became friends and I envied the way she seemed to be so calm, and the way she turned her tiny, dusty room into a sanctuary. I wasn't good at feeding myself in those days, and I still remember coming back to the house on a chilly autumn day and smelling the butternut squash that Joy had in the oven. It was such an un-looked for comfort when she shared it with me, with cinnamon and brown sugar. Joy was the person I told when our family secret began to eat me alive. I've heard that, if you remain friends with someone past the seven-year mark, you will be friends for life. Joy will be a friend for life.

It snowed. A gentle layer of white. This was followed by a freezing rain. But we made our appointment anyway. I wore Wellingtons and sported an umbrella, and Joy wore a weatherproof Patagonia coat. We sat at a tea shop for a while, and then went to the national gallery where we shopped for Christmas gifts and I found a re-print of the medieval music sheets that Chrissy liked so well in Venice. I wandered upstairs for a visit to the Impressionists and Dutch painters whom I always love. Monet and Van Gogh, Vermeer and Rembrandt have always made my heart sing.

We shopped at a Christmas market as the sellers began to close their booths. We bought homemade soaps, and chocolate sauce, and we stopped for Tapas at a Spanish-themed restaurant across the street from my old apartment.

When I first met her, Joy was studying philosophy. Perhaps this is one of the reasons for our friendship: our shared love of philosophical inquiry. Last night, over wine and potato omelet, and thin slices of beef, She deployed the Socratic method on me.

"What are you afraid of?"
"What is the belief at the basis of that fear?"
"Is it true?"
"Can you absolutely know that it's true?"
"How do you react...how does it feel in your body, when you believe that thought?"
"Who would you be if you no longer had that belief?"

I think that I am more introspective than most. I think that I subject my thoughts and decisions to far more analytical rigor than any person should. I've been critical of people like Sjors who buy-in to a belief system and external social construct at the cost of their own happiness and I've thought I was a forward-thinker. Over the years, I've shucked the belief systems I was raised in, and I assume that I am a data-driven analyst.

I assumed the problem with my pain was my inability to grow emotionally or spiritually - it was never a problem with my mind. But perhaps the problem lies elsewhere: perhaps I have not deployed my analytical abilities sufficiently. Perhaps I have not challenged my own personal beliefs.

Certainly great evil has been done to me. I feel that it wound be naieve or ignorant to turn away from these things. Similarly, I feel that it betrays the profound experience I shared with Sjors if I were to challenge my beliefs about that relationship. But now that the door is open, I think it is only right to begin the inquiry.