The Whole Truth: Winter Sledding Incident

As I grow older, I am starting to realize that my mind doesn't always work quite the way I think it should. In fact, it often plays tricks on me. This is the first of a intended short series of articles to highlight some of the wisdom I am gaining when it comes to understanding myself.

I am in my late 40's, and the incident in question goes back to my youth, when I was a preteen. My family had recently moved to a new small city in Saskatchewan, an upgrade from the small town where my younger sister and I had grown up.

The house we lived in at that time, a brand new build, was luckily only a short walk from a local park with one decently large hill that the kids in the neighbourhood would use for tobogganing in the winter. Both of us, being from that era pre-Internet and cellphones, were used to spending hours enjoying the outdoors to entertain ourselves. So on one wintery afternoon on a weekend we grabbed our sleds to go partake in the speed of throwing ourselves down the hill.

Now, being completely honest, I don't remember many more details about actually enjoying the sledding, because something else happened which has predominated my memories of that day. While my sister and I, the only kids on the hill at that particular time, we're enjoying ourselves, a couple older kids arrived. And they did not want to sled, they wanted to provoke us, well mostly me I think, into a fight.

I've never been a fighter. I have rarely had the self-confidence to stand up for myself in confrontational situations, especially those of a physical nature. My instinct has always defaulted to "flight mode." This case was certainly no different. As I recall, my sister and I both fled the seen at the sign of approaching trouble. What has always stuck out the most in my memories of that day though, is that I have guilt around not believing that I made sure my sister was safe during our escape, that I was worried most about saving myself.

That guilt has remained with me for many years. In fact, it was only during a visit with my sister last year, that I brought up the incident and my recollection of the events. I was tired of carrying that guilt. My sister heard my side of the story, but it wasn't until our next visit that she told her side.

And it was not the same. Yes, we had gone sledding together. Yes, a couple older kids had approached us wanting to start a fight. But, big brother sent little sister off ahead and made sure she got away. In fact, she remembers getting home first and waiting for me to show up. And she believes that as I result I got beat up, and she was carrying guilt for having not stuck around with me to support me.

So here we were, both of us some 30 years after the incident, relieving ourselves of guilt from a traumatic incident of our past that we had never cleared up until now.

But to put the icing on the cake, my sister's revelations happened while we were both visiting our parents. Neither of which had any recollection at all of the the said incident! Perspective really is important. As Marcus Aurelius puts it "Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." This is just one simple example of how we each see our own truth in any given situation, and in some cases even worse, reinforce that truth over time.

I am grateful to have taken the time to revisit this past event with my family, and to realize that I no longer need to punish myself for those actions or inactions. I also hope I can pass this lesson on to my children, to teach them that it is permissible, even desirable, to challenge their memories and seek the clarification from others sooner in their lives.

Scott Stewart

January 15, 2022