The Best I Can Do Right Now

A thought came to me:

Don’t give me an answer that wins. Give me the truth. And I doubt that you can unless you have thought deeply from the place that we keep hidden.

I wrote it down and immediately began interfering with it.

“Wins” didn’t seem right. It made the whole thing sound like an argument between two people, when I was thinking more about the answers we give ourselves.

Perhaps I meant the answer that suffices. The one that explains enough and allows us to move on.

Then there was “the truth,” which is quite a thing to demand from anybody. It assumes there is a complete and accurate explanation waiting inside us, if only we are brave enough to look.

So I tried writing about hidden fears, old wounds and the stories we tell ourselves. Before long, I was beginning to enjoy the smell of my own incense.

That wasn’t right either.

There is a simple observation beneath all this. An explanation can be sincere and still be incomplete. We do not always understand our own reasons, and sometimes the explanation that makes the most sense is also the one that asks the least of us.

But even that can be picked apart.

Looking inward does not guarantee insight. We can discover hidden motives, but we can also invent them. The deeper explanation is not automatically the better one. Sometimes a straightforward answer is straightforward because it is true.

This is not an argument against plain answers. If someone asks whether I did something, the answer is yes or no. Not being hugged enough as a baby is not a third option.

What happened and why it happened are different questions. An explanation is not a substitute for an admission.

This is armchair thinking at best.

Still, I think there is something worth keeping: a good answer should remain open to another question. Not because something profound must be buried underneath it, but because certainty sometimes arrives before understanding does.

Perhaps I cannot ask for the truth.

I can only give the best answer available to me, knowing that I may not fully understand the reasons behind it. I can question what I might have left out and remain willing to revise it.

It may not be the truth.

It is the best I can do right now.

And the best will have to do.