Is It True?

"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

— Anaïs Nin

For years, the Fourth of July on our cul-de-sac was something people planned for.

The whole street shut down traffic. We hauled out lawn chairs and BBQs and picnic tables, and let the kids run loose with sparklers while the real show got underway. That last part was always orchestrated by a few of the dads, who started out perfectly reasonable and, over time, got increasingly creative with their pyrotechnics. By the end, we're talking about bottle rockets launched with great conviction toward cedar shake roofs and the limbs of cedar trees. Every year, someone's eyebrows were in mild jeopardy of being singed. But this was our time, and it was loud, and it was good.

Until it wasn't. That summer, the conversation turned serious and the concerns weren't unfounded. Dry heat and very little rain had heightened the worry about fire, along with enough near-misses over the years that the neighborhood finally agreed to call it off.

So our little family drove into Seattle instead to watch the fireworks over the water with my daughter and a couple of her friends. We battled the holiday traffic, came home late, and went to bed.

Which is why, sometime after midnight, when I heard screaming and the sound of cars moving in the street, my first thought was not alarm. It was irritation. Those girls. Teenagers, car keys, midnight energy, no regard for anyone trying to sleep. I was already composing the conversation I planned to have in the morning.

Then I looked out the window and saw the house at the end of the street fully engulfed in flames.

Six fire trucks. Neighbors in robes spraying down their lawns and rooftops. By the time the flames were out and the sun came up, the story had already written itself. This had to be the handiwork of kids with fireworks. The neighborhood nodded over coffee like the matter was settled. It completely vindicated the decision to cancel the party.

But was it true? No. The Fire Marshal's report told a different story. The fire was caused by old wiring on a hot tub that nobody had used in years. Not a single bottle rocket involved. Just wiring that had been sitting there, unattended and deteriorating, long before anyone thought to look.

Nobody on that street set out to reach the wrong conclusion. We just had a gap, and a gap is an uncomfortable place to stand, so we filled it with the story that already fit what we believed. We needed it to be the fireworks because we had already decided fireworks were the danger. The story fit. So we stopped there.

I've done this in my own life more times than I'd like to count, and with higher stakes than a neighborhood rumor. I've decided someone didn't care because they didn't call back on my schedule. I've looked at a situation and, before anything actually happened, written an ending I was convinced was coming, then started pulling back to spare myself the arrival. It felt like self-awareness. It even felt a little like wisdom. What I was actually doing was running old wiring through a new situation and calling it intuition. In other words, I just KNOW.

There's a question I return to now, borrowed from Byron Katie: is it true? Not is it possible, not does it feel true, not has something like this happened before. Is it actually, verifiably true? Most of the time, if I'm honest, what I have is a decision, not a discovery. And decisions dressed up as discoveries have a way of costing more than we realize.

I see this in my work constantly. The misunderstanding that calcifies into something permanent. The expectation that was never spoken, never examined, never given a fair hearing, just held and then silently tallied against someone who had no idea there was a scoreboard. The relationship that erodes not from anything that actually happened, but from everything that was assumed and never investigated. We call it protecting ourselves. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it is just old wiring, doing what old wiring does when nobody's checked it in years.

The hot tub sat there for years before anyone thought to look at it twice. It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't intentional. It was just old and unattended and eventually, in the right conditions, it became a problem nobody saw coming.

I find myself wondering, with some regularity, which of my own conclusions deserve a closer look. Some conclusions hold up under scrutiny. Others were never really conclusions at all. Just old wiring nobody thought to check.