Matters of Truth

The truth is incredibly important to me. I have my mother to thank for that.

My mother gave me the best reason that I have ever heard to always be truthful. She said, with regards to lying, that it is very seldom when you can tell just one lie; often, one lie leads to other lies in order to support the first lie, then an effort has to be made to remember all the lies that you told so you can keep telling a consistent story. She pointed out that if you always tell the truth, it is easy to remember and recount what truly happened and to be consistent about the facts. This explanation made perfect sense to me, and as a result, I made a decision to be as truthful as I could from that point forward.

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." - Mark Twain

Prior to that time, however, I had told my parents some lies. As a part of transforming to a truthful person, I decided that I had to come clean about all the lies that I had told my folks so that I would no longer have the guilt that I carried as a result of the lies that I had told. I was seeking a clean slate, as it were. So, one day when I was around seven or eight years of age, while my parents were driving me somewhere distant and I was sitting in the back seat of the car, I carefully outlined all of the lies that I had told my parents to that date, at least the ones that I could remember. As I was still pretty young at the time, my intentions were not totally pure in that I couldn’t wait to receive praise from my parents for having the maturity to come clean about my lies and for making a resolution to be a truthful person from that time forward. The best laid plans of men, however, can totally fail to produce the desired results, and I was confused when there was a deafening silence from the front seat after I finished my speech with a flourish. I was too young at the time to realize that my folks might actually be rightfully disappointed by my telling lies in the first place, and being human, they needed time to absorb the information that I had so recently revealed to even know how to react. I was one strange little kid, to say the least.

Although social media was not a part of my reality when I was growing up, it is such a part of our culture now that it is worth mentioning here. It has become too easy to hide behind a fake persona on the internet. My handles on social media often feature my first name and my profiles include my picture. I choose to be as transparent as I can be on social media because it is too easy to hide behind a handle and say anything, including lies and even hurtful things to strangers. I have been attacked on social media for airing my truth, as have many people that I know. In spite of this, I feel that the power of social media is the ability to spread truth far and wide. Healthy discourse, disagreement, and debate is an opportunity to explore truth from other people’s point of view and we have the opportunity to connect with people that we otherwise might not have using the Internet. I am grateful to have this forum on which to post my experiences and hard-earned wisdom.

A few notes about memory and bias when related to the truth. People can believe absolutely that they remember the truth of a situation when their memory didn’t record the facts exactly as they occurred and there are distortions from reality; this is, to my mind, often the way that episodic memory works. Memory is a funny thing and can be so impacted by factors such as time, trauma, bias, and age. This is human. I remember being involved in a court case where several of my friends were testifying, and it was very interesting to hear the past described by my friends because although the testimonies were generally very consistent, there were minor inconsistencies that reflected peoples’ best efforts to present the truth from their memories. With regards to bias, I feel

it is very hard to avoid bias when looking at the truth because as humans, we see reality through our own lenses, so to speak, so sometimes I like to say ‘that is my truth’ when I’m trying to explain my own position. I would hazard to say that the best we can do as humans is to align ourselves with the purest truth that we know at the time, and always strive to understand objective truth, which is truth seen with the greatest clarity and the least amount of bias possible.

All of that being said, expect truth, or ‘my truth,’ if you prefer, from this blog. I know that the truth is sometimes hard to hear, but it is also so true that the truth will set your free.