Aligned & Awake: Time Reveals Truth (and Also My Sweat Glands)

A 300-year-old painting caught me mid-hot-flash and had the nerve to be right.

Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.

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London has a habit of rewarding curiosity.

I turned down a street I’d never noticed before and found a tiny bookshop. Wandered through a mews and found someone tending roses outside a centuries-old cottage. Pushed open an unassuming set of doors and ended up somewhere that left me standing there, whispering, “Well… I wasn’t expecting that.”

That’s how I found the Wallace Collection.

Tucked inside Hertford House, an elegant eighteenth-century townhouse, it somehow feels both grand and welcoming. Once home to aristocrats, it’s now filled with paintings, sculptures, armour, porcelain, furniture, and chandeliers so enormous they deserve their own postcode. Better yet, it’s free, one of the many things I already love about London, where an ordinary afternoon can turn extraordinary without any warning at all.

I wandered from room to room, taking my time, peering into display cabinets, tilting my head at portraits, reading every little placard about the house’s history like I might be quizzed on it later, partly for the paintings, partly for the armour, mostly for the air con.

London was mid-heatwave, the kind where the Tube turns into a slow cooker and strangers stop making eye contact out of collective shame. Hertford House, God bless it, had working air con, and I clung to that cool air like it owed me money. I would have read the plaque about a chandelier’s provenance eleven times if it meant staying in that room a little longer. My imagination was having a lovely, climate-controlled afternoon.

My feet were not.

My back had started sending strongly worded complaints to management. Underneath it all, perimenopause didn’t care about London’s air con. Some truths just show up whether you invite them or not.

Then I spotted a chair.

It was, without question, the most beautiful chair I’d seen all day. I sat down, let out the sort of sigh that women over forty understand without needing subtitles, and lifted my eyes.

Directly in front of me hung a painting by François Le Moine.

Time Revealing Truth.

Time revealing Truth by Francios le Moine | Photo: Tanya Fraser

I laughed out loud. Life has a wicked sense of humour.

The painting shows Time lifting Truth into the light while Falsehood slinks off beneath them, caught mid-exit. It was painted almost three hundred years ago, and the message hasn’t aged a day.

Time reveals truth. Simple, profound, and completely unavoidable, even when I’m just trying to find somewhere to sit down.

I sat there for quite a while, looking at the painting and then, somehow, looking at my own life.

I thought about all the questions I’ve carried over the years. The moments that made no sense while I was living them. The relationships I spent far too much energy trying to understand. The dreams that insisted on taking the scenic route instead of the direct flight.

Time has been doing its work patiently all along, asking no permission and missing no deadlines.

The years have peeled back layers I couldn’t see at the time. They’ve shown me people for who they really are, parts of myself that had been waiting, rather politely, for me to notice them, and dreams that never actually left the building no matter how many practical reasons I gave them to.

They’ve also brought me here, to a city where I can spend an afternoon wandering through a magnificent old house, sit beneath a masterpiece because my hormones demanded a tea break, and leave carrying far more than I arrived with.

That’s why I love museums. They’re filled with other people’s lives, questions, and attempts to make sense of things. Sometimes, if I’m paying attention, they help me make sense of my own.

I stood up. My back had gone over management’s head. My feet were already talking to a union rep.

Fair enough. Truth had somewhere to be, and so, eventually, did I.

I smiled at the painting anyway, then wandered back out into the London streets with a reminder I hadn’t gone looking for: some things never need to be forced.

Truth has excellent timing. It has all the time in the world.

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Tell me…

Did you have a time where truth showed up uninvited?

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