The Truth, (I’m a girl, I’m smart and I know everything) has so many topics embedded into it for mothers and daughters and anyone who has walked the path of growing up as a girl that I hardly know which to pick. Let’s look at purity of heart.
Purity of heart is in my opinion as a woman, a positive psychologist and having been a girl, is a special vision that we often have in childhood. It is not just seeing with our eyes. It is a sixth sense combined with tender feelings and acute awareness of our surroundings.
For example, when Laura Engals describes to us the way she ran through the prairie grass and looked up into the sky to follow hawks and looked at the starts at night while her father played the fiddle, her words evoke a purity of heart sensation in even adults. She was able as a writer to create the whole atmosphere of her life on the prairie so that we feel something new and fresh and yet eternal as we read The Little House on The Prairie.
In The Truth (I’m a girl, I’m smart and I know everything) I have tried to capture the same sense of purity of heart. When the ‘girl’ is upset when her cousin swears it isn’t because she is making a moral judgment. It is because the swear words just feel bad as they hit her across the room. And when she dances with her mother up in the bedroom to rock and roll music, the relief of connecting with her mom and the pleasure of moving, laughing and hugging together is all there is. This is the moment and it is pure.
Purity of heart is a clean feeling and when we have purity of heart moments we can feel cleansed and delighted at the same time. Or if they are upsetting moments, as when the ‘girl’s’ cousin swore at least she knew he was not right and there was some relief just in the expression of her emotions.
As a positive psychologist I wanted to incorporate purity of heart into The Truth as we at all ages need to remember the intense pure feelings of childhood, both for ourselves and for the next generation. We need to remember them for ourselves so we can go there once again and experience the sweetness and passion that goes with really being alive, not just sleepwalking as sometimes we do as grown-ups. And for the next generation’s sake we need to remember because we need to connect with our children and grandchildren and we need to reassure them and help validate for them that their emotions are not only pure but often more in tune with what is right that we are. Aging is not necessarily becoming emotionally more astute. Aging can sometimes just be aging.
The Truth (I’m a girl, I’m smart and I know everything) has many themes and one of them is most certainly don’t sleepwalk. Stay alive as you age and let the kids you know refresh you as well as the kid you was were. After all, she is still inside of you! I promise and that’s the truth!
It was fascinating for me to go between the two books-THE ENCHANTED SELF being a rather dense book, full of case studies, positive psychology techniques, historical perspectives on women, my own journey as a woman in our society, etc. and The Truth which is a girl’s diary written in a simple, easy manner. However, what struck me as the most fun as we chatted was our discussion about “Mystery Rides”. The girl in The Truth goes on mystery rides with her family on Sunday afternoons and loves them. I was sharing her adventures when both Mary and Pam joined in saying that they also, had gone on mystery rides as children.