God, I hated when people said that to me. My truth. My authentic self. I’ve been searching all my life for my authentic self. And I’ve been doing it authentically. Obviously 😜
The first workshop I co-wrote with my friend Pete, just after I left the corporate world, was called “Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Taken.”
It reflected my niggling desire to find my truth. I’d resigned because I had this fear that if I kept going, one day I’d be lying awake on my deathbed (yes, very dramatic) filled with a regret I’d always known was coming: Why hadn’t I lived the life I truly wanted, instead of the one that ticked everyone else’s boxes?
The Greek word for truth is aletheia (ἀλήθεια). It literally means: to reveal that which until now has been concealed.
And when you dive into the roots of the word it becomes more interesting. In Greek mythology, Lethe was one of the five rivers of Hades. The souls of the dead had to drink from its waters to forget their earthly life before they could reincarnate. The word ‘lethe’ in ancient Greek means ‘oblivion’ or ‘forgetfulness’, and ‘aletheia’, as its negation, means ‘unforgetfulness’ or ‘remembrance’.
So aletheia isn’t just about revealing, it’s also about unforgetting.
I love this idea of truth as something waiting to be revealed or remembered.
When I work with clients, I’m looking for their aletheia. Their essence. The part unique to each of us when we’re born that we unconsciously hide so we can feel safe in the world, so we can fit in.
Most of us spend the first half of life operating from the programming we built, hiding our essence. And we do this extremely well, we build great lives from this place. But there’s a niggle from that concealed part, the part we hid when we were younger.
Then comes the second half of life. And the existential awareness that finitude brings. That hidden part yearns to be revealed. The aletheia, the truth in all of us.
It’s what the spiritual traditions call “coming home.”
Think of Odysseus in The Odyssey. He spent the first half of his life at war in Troy. He won the battle, achieved everything he could have dreamed of, the riches, the status, the validation.
Not dissimilar to many of us with our careers.
But something was missing.
It’s the journey home to Ithaca that allows him, through many trials and adventures, to metaphorically shed his programmed personality and discover his aletheia.
This is what midlife transition really is: the opportunity to come home to who we truly are.
Not because the first half of life was wrong. For most of us, we were operating from survival, often successfully, but now is the time to create from essence.
And that, I believe, can make the next chapter the most fulfilling and life-affirming of all.
So maybe those people were right after all. Find your truth. Except remember, you’re not searching for it out there in the world…
You’re unconcealing and unforgetting it from within 🙃
