A truth in itself?

About eight years ago, my father-in-law emigrated to Australia. Since then, we have visited him down under three times. He lives there with a woman he already loved in his youth and was almost engaged to then, and they are having a great time together, even though they are well in their eighties now and things are not all functioning as well as they used to, however, they are having some great people to support them. We ourselves write on a regular basis and so they stay in touch with everyday life here, they phone every now and then, and each time we spoke to them on the phone there was the question you could count on: when will you visit us again?

For Joep and me there is no doubt about it that we will go whenever we get inspiration to do so from our inner Selves, and it has been done accordingly all previous times. Only then our inspiration matched their expectations, and now the longer period in between is longer than they hoped for. Since up till now we have not had inspiration for a new trip. Now according to the remains of our personalities we are somewhat 'not good' because we do not honor their request ánd do not have some convincing arguments in return. In order to be able to get rid of the question (and especially the interpretation which follows from there and the feeling which accompanies it), this spring my personality came up with the following: tell them it simply financially is not possible to spend a couple of thousands of Euro on a trip every other year, and that we do continue the contact through other modern communication devices.

This sounded very logical, and the remains of my personality adopted it immediately, enjoy this: despite that it was a good lesson in admitting that even in our household the sky is not always the limit (which my personality liked others to believe), the remains of my personality now made up a great story in which nót going was justified. It was now officially 'proven' that we could not go. And in order to prevent my father-in-law from being too much of the good guy anyway, he looked for some fault in him as well: he does not want to come to Holland anymore, thus leaving the traveling up to us, in the meantime he does all kinds of pleasant things, buys an expensive new car and lets us account for the huge costs involved with traveling to the other side of the world (while he díd sponsor my brother-in-law for doing so, which has provided a great practice situation over the past few years!). On top of that, when we are very honest, we do not really find anything really worth while in Australia which even my personality could use to want to go there. So we ourselves do not have the urge to go. And the remains of my personality now had it altogether well arranged, this 'was right' and he was very right because of it.

However, this did not mean the experiences regarding this issue became more pleasant. Because when you start to believe the above to be true, then the inspiration from your inner Self automatically has to be untrue, and for me that is simply unpleasant because I know the alternative so well. And when I were to receive inspiration at this very moment to go, I would go, whether or not there would be money 'available' for it or not. In the mean time, I had to repeat all these arguments over and over again for myself, sometimes in contacts with the folks down under. This does not mean things became more pleasant. I even noticed that I used this to explain to friends our not-going, whereas before I did not hesitate to simply tell them that 'I did not receive any inspiration to do so'. This also starts the personality guilt trip which accompanies this process, this time using issues like denying myself and Joep something for pure financial reasons, that we would be able to go and spend the money when my father-in-law would die, that the trip might be made cheaper in itself which would mean that it were easier to go, wondering whether my inlaws would interpret it as a request for money. Etc.
All in all a fine example of the endless vicious circle your personality makes up when you make óne sentence - which did not mean anything in itself - for truth.

Looking back on it, this story gave me some fine moments of increasing awareness (ánd a column). Furthermore I let it go altogether again and returned to where I came from: easy listening to the inspiration of my inner Self, and no longer believing the rest to be a truth in itself nor strengthen these ideas. By the way: since I have let go of this once more, the question has not been posed since then ;-)