The Beauty of Truth
The truth really does set you free.
As small children, something we all once were, we learn about the concept of truth. Like the air we breathe, it’s simple and yet vital. We cannot live without it. When the sharp tone of our mother’s voice tells us that despite our best efforts, our faces have betrayed us and she knows exactly who ate the missing cookie from the cookie jar, we discover the sting that comes with intentionally deviating from the truth.
Truth is that which most perfectly aligns with reality. It is the thing that when examined from any angle, when probed and questioned by anyone, when sought after honestly, willingly reveals itself in all of its naked glory. It makes possible all that is necessary because it describes what is. A hundred thousand years ago when we were small tribes of hunter-gatherers, truth made cooperation possible. We discovered the benefits of working as a large group instead of as individuals. Today it is an absolute necessity for our society to function as well as it does. Nearly all the we do each and every day depends upon the truth. Whether it’s trusting that the grocery store will be open and stocked in the morning, that those who keep the electricity flowing can be counted upon to do so and countless other things large and small, without truth it would all fall apart.
We value most those who we can be sure will reliably tell us the truth. Why? Because we can’t possibly know all that is going on in the world. And yet, the more we know and the more accurately we know it, the better the decisions we will make. Well informed decisions don’t guarantee that things will go our way of course. But poorly informed ones nearly always result in unmet expectations to put it mildly. When we are lucky, the outcome can easily be dismissed and forgotten. When we are not so lucky, they can be the harbinger of disaster that cannot be undone. We learn to keep our distance from those who we find do not consistently tell us the truth, especially those whose narratives do not describe reality but instead paint a beautiful picture over some darker, hidden agenda.
Despite this we sometimes choose not to seek the truth or to not see it even when it slaps us hard in the face. We do this when we know or even simply suspect that the truth awaiting us, the reality that awaits us, is going to be anything from inconvenient to nearly impossible to face. As our anxiety increases, our desperation to be relieved of it grows. The drug of self-delusion becomes ever more intoxicating. We begin to tell ourselves what we want to hear or worse, signal to those around us to be our co-conspirators in the charade. We look away convincing ourselves that if we do so long enough, the ugliness we wish to avoid will somehow be replaced by the beauty of what we had hoped would be. Sadly of course this never is the case. Often the longer we have spent avoiding it, the more time we will waste cleaning up the now larger than necessary mess we created.
We sometimes convince ourselves that a small lie won’t really hurt anyone. The problem is that a lie, even a small one, keeps potentially important information from others. When someone asks you for your opinion, lying to them because you believe the truth might hurt their feelings prevents them from making a potentially better decision than they will now make. You willfully send them off in the wrong direction. Should they ever discover this you may, in their eyes, go from confidant to conman. The more lying that goes on, the more the picture you have painted deviates from the real world. Over time it can become difficult to impossible to keep track of these differences.
And yet all of this pain, trouble and anxiety can be avoided completely. That is the beauty of truth. It perfectly describes the actual reality in which we live. That is what makes it beautiful. We can face what is coming head on making choices that sometimes won’t be the ones we had hoped to make but will nevertheless align with the reality of our lives. Avoiding the truth is to take on a debt that grows, often with interest, and must eventually be paid off. The astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “It is better to see the universe as it truly is than to persist in a delusion not matter how satisfying or reassuring.”
For most, however, it is not an easy transition. You may have become accustomed to occasionally not being entirely truthful with others or more importantly with yourself. We often have assumed that the truth will be far worse than it actually turns out to be. In my experience the truth has always been, in the long run, the far easier burden to bear. There have occasionally been times in my own life when telling the truth was going to be to my detriment. Sometimes the end result could have been life-altering. Even when it was painful, being truthful always was best in the end. Telling the truth literally makes you more trustworthy and those are exactly the sorts of people with which we each want to have relationships. It is being surrounded by good people who care about us that makes life worth living, doesn’t it?
Being honest does not require being brutal. You can convey the truth in a way that gives the recipient useful information without bashing them over the head with it. You must also be willing to be honest with yourself. You may have been telling yourself things that were untrue because it felt better to do so. That feeling might be good in the short term, but in the long run, over the course of years or perhaps your entire lifetime, it will result in making decisions that deviate from reality in ways large and small. Like tiny cracks, they can eventually add up causing everything to collapse.
Living a life of honesty, recognizing the beauty of truth, has likely been easier for me than others. I was raised by the most honest person I have ever known: my father. He was raised by the most honest person he ever knew: his father. Considering that my grandfather lost both of his parents as a child, was dirt poor, never had any formal education and certainly attended the school of hard knocks, it’s surprising he valued honesty so greatly. But then, perhaps not. Perhaps living so close to the surface of reality, perhaps having no realistic way to avoid it, helped him see its beauty. Perhaps he had no choice but to count upon it. I only wish I had thought to ask him before he died.
As the saying goes, today is the first day of the rest of your life. You can’t change what is behind you but you can decide in what direction you will now go. You can decide to live an honest life. That means always being honest even when it’s to your detriment because principles only mean something if you stand by them when it’s inconvenient. You will likely find that, unencumbered by having to keep track of every point where you deviated from reality and sometimes suffering the consequences of it, you truly have been set free.