Truth

Truth

People tell lies everywhere they go, even to their closest friends, families, and themselves. I have a habit of lying when it comes to trying to explain a situation. It’s under those certain circumstances where I know it will take more than the necessary time to explain why I am at the store, how I am actually doing, or what I really feel. And most of the time people are really not interested in what you have to say, so to respect that, you tell a lie. But the weird occurrence is that even while I am telling a lie, I want to tell the truth. I have an urge to be ‘righteous’ and good, but the falsehood ends up dominating. Does that mean that humans innately search truth, but ultimately are consumed by immorality?

I guess I have been thinking about the truth and the purpose of life ever since that Thursday. You know, when Mrs. Clinch mesmerized and blew our minds by reading Winesburg, Ohio. I started reading the book before, but the close-reading made me realize there are even more elements to look for and question. The particular section that blew me away once again was, “it was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood” (Anderson, 2). What does this possibly mean? Maybe human’s imperfections corrupt and disrupt the beautiful matters of life. Maybe humans have their own truth to live by but are blinded by the other truths of the world; therefore, committing themselves to live by something that is not their own. OR maybe there is no such thing as the ‘truth’ when humans come into the picture.

But what is ‘truth’? No, really think about it. Is it the same thing as a fact? Because when we tell the truth, it can be a different version to another. If truth is a perception of reality, then there is never one truth or even a universal truth. You can believe in the same ‘truth’ as another but it can’t be the same because it becomes personalized in different ways. What my mom may think is the truth may be different from what I believe. Dictionary.com has many definition but all of them gravitate to “conformity with fact or reality; verity”. Really? Is that really what truth is? I think there is a reason why truth cannot be the same as a fact because truth is diverse. When you watch a crime movie, the prosecutors are always saying, “Tell the truth” but shouldn’t they just be saying, “Tell us what happened” because with the word ‘truth’ there can be so many discrepancies.

I guess I have digressed and have jumped from asking about the convenience of truth to what truth really is. But writing about it really made me think about what truth might be.