What’s the Most Honest Sentence You Can Say Today?
By: Eva Keiffenheim
Tags: Life Lessons, Honesty, Advice, Reflections, Female Sexuality

What’s the Most Honest Sentence You Can Say Today?

The single question Ernest Hemingway asked himself every day.

Photo by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

Before he started to write, Ernest Hemingway would ask himself the same question every morning. In his memoir ‘A Moveable Feast,’ he writes:

“I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”

In the past five days, I used Hemingway’s question to write down the most honest sentence I can say that day.

1) Family is best treated like a delicate band of friendship.

I’ve been aiming for a healthy relationship with my sister for years. Most of the time, I fail, and we leave the conversation frustrated. When talking to Sarah, a coach, yoga teacher, and one of the most reflective persons I know, something clicked.

We shouldn’t take a good relationship with our family for granted.

Sarah helped me to dismantle toxic beliefs like: “Your family must make you feel good. Your family should always be there for you. Your family should always care for you.”

Would you treat a single friend with these “must” and “should’s”?

Let’s stop taking the family for granted and holding them to unachievable standards. Instead, let’s treat our family bonds like a delicate band of friendship.

2) I fear Lockdown 2.0 turns my generation into working machines.

From 2016–2018 I finished a business master's in Vienna, and most of my former colleagues didn’t break up with their résumé but went into management consulting or joined one of the Big Four.

Two months ago, one friend quit his consultant job and joined a corporate to improve his work-life balance. In our monthly alumni meetup, he said a sentence that stuck with me:

„It’s a different kind of life quality when you can stop working at 7 PM and still have some parts of the evening to enjoy with your girlfriend, with friends, or doing sports. It’s better than coming home around 10 PM, falling straight into bed, getting up the next day to start the same thing all over again.“

While I’m happy, my friend made a choice that improved his life quality, I wonder what kind of life we’re living if we’re celebrating to stop working at 7 PM instead of 10 PM.

Do we live to work? Or do we live to live?

Lockdown 2.0 nudges us into living for work. No cafés, no bars, no sports events, no meet-ups — we’re mostly working. A lot. For knowledge workers, work seems the only element that continues like before, and it takes up a lot of space in our lives.

3) Meditation can decrease human suffering.

Yuval Noah Harari says we’ve accumulated material wealth over the last decades. And yet, we can’t say whether we’re happier than our ancestors in the stone-age. We have not yet figured how to measure and decrease human suffering.

Many people have fancy gadgets, like fitness-trackers, self-driving cars, or smart home devices. We accumulate possessions and meanwhile forget to look inside ourselves.

Yuval Noah Harari, who meditates for two hours a day and visits a silent meditation retreat once a year, writes:

“People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them. This is the aim of Buddhist meditation practices. In medittion, you are supposed to closely observe your mind and body, witness the ceaseless arising and passing of all your feelings, and realise how pointless it is to pursue them. When the pursuit stops, the mind becomes very relaxed, clear and satisfied. All kinds of feelings go on arising and passing — joy, anger, boredom, lust — but once you stop craving particular feelings, you can just accept them for what they are. You live in the present moment instead of fantasising about what might have been. The resulting serenity is so profound that those who spend their lives in the frenzied pursuit of pleasant feelings can hardly imagine it.”

Once we stop looking for external satisfaction and start looking inside ourselves, most worries will vanish. I absolutely agree that meditation can decrease our suffering and make us feel more connected.

4) Our generation forgot most about female pleasure.

Porn and our imagination of what makes „good sex“are so far from our inherent truths. We’re on the blink of forgetting what it feels like to really reunite with each other.

My partner and I spent the last three years exploring sex. We tried evidence-based female pleasure techniques, talked to befriended couples, took an online course by a psychiatrist specialized in desire, and read the comics of Liv Strömquist and books by Diana Richardson.

If women don’t enjoy sex and, as a result, don’t want to have regular sex, there’s nothing wrong with them. Instead, they haven’t learned about the endless alternatives to male-centric sex. A clitoric climax and a woman pleasing a man to come to an end have nothing to do with the feeling of true reunion.

And while there’s so much I don’t know yet; it feels sincere to say our generation forgot most about female pleasure.

5) It’s better to ask questions than to give answers.

Life is more interesting when we ask and ask and ask. By asking instead of talking, we learn about different realities and break flawed storylines that make up your life. The more we start to question our beliefs, the richer our worldview becomes.

Giving answers boosts our egos, asking questions improves our lives.

All of us are ignorant in some way or another. Just ask yourself if you have never changed your opinion on a deep-held belief. Have you ever questioned the basics?

Our world would be more peaceful if we dared to find a person who believes things strongly different from us. Then, have an honest conversation with this person. Or, as Euripides put it: