WHOLE
Friday July 5, 2013
You can’t walk into a store to buy it by pound, quart or cubic metre; it doesn’t come packaged as solid, liquid or gas. No price on it, but we know it is priceless.
We use it in pinches, dollops and smidgens. Or we can dump it in truckloads, we can’t carry it on our shoulders some days, but mostly – when we try, we are like Atlas holding it high . . .
This elusive commodity, more slippery than mercury, is truth.
Simple stuff. Sure.
But when someone insists on knowing, it seems to work out badly as often as not.
Insisting.
Whole truth.
Complete truth.
It doesn’t start out that way.
Seems like a simple request, like yes or no, black or white, on or off?
Easy, simple, direct and a short question.
Truth isn’t that way.
It is full, complex, robust, woven into complexities of our lives, so when someone asks those in your face questions, the tendency is to dodge that bullet – to bend out of the way, to answer the question while guarding the whole, preventing someone from seeing the whole picture, keeping it to ourselves.
But when we do that, are we doing ourselves or that other person a service?
Saying we aren’t worried when we are, not frightened when we are, happy when we aren’t, unperturbed when we are off the charts disturbed!
Simple things, clear things, easy things – can get messed up by telling truth as easily as they can by stretching or distorting facts, massaging descriptions of feelings to be nice, orchestrating the sequence of things to not hurt someone’s feelings.
Truth can be split, like fine hairs – shades, grades of nearly complete truth, not the same as pure whole things, something we so easily demand from others but sometimes deliver far less adequately ourselves.
Do you want truth? Pick your definition, pick your illusions of reality, split-hairs on your grasp of validity – accuracy, actuality, authenticity, axiom, case, certainty, correctness, exactitude, exactness, fact, facts, factualism, factuality, factualness, genuineness, gospel truth, gospel, honest truth, infallibility, inside track, legitimacy, maxim, naked truth, nitty-gritty, perfection, picture, plain talk, precision, principle, rectitude, rightness, scoop, score, trueness, truism, truthfulness, unvarnished truth, veracity, verisimilitude, verity, whole story . . .
Don’t read the newspaper if you are looking for the truth, the whole truth or nothing but the truth.
Don’t listen to anyone.
Don’t look it up in a book, on Google or Bing, don’t believe any single thing.
Or swallow it.
I have become demanding of myself and others in the truth department – some days feeling like a senior manager of it, just as often feeling like the rookie employee who keeps stumbling and lately I’ve been wondering about this subject a lot more. Private things – withholding them, isn’t failure to tell truth, but simply not sharing our every and most personal private thoughts, issues and facts with the world. These get blurry . . .
I write about truth often.
I struggle with many things, but truth and my relationship with it, truth telling and having those I deal with telling truth too, or at least telling it to me – which ought to be easy, is often one of the day’s most challenging tasks.
It can turn an extrovert to a hermit very easily.
It can press us flat until the stuffin’ is squeezed right out of us.
Kindness and truth can be neighbours – cooperative, getting along, but they aren’t twins and should never be mistaken for the same things.
We have to carry our baggage with us wherever we go in life. I think we can lighten our load – because truth is pretty light, sometimes awkward, but no so difficult to carry.
Its distortions are heavy and weigh us down. We sometimes take lies and distortions for truth – because they are wrapped up in bows and presented so nicely.
Hard to tell at a distance or up close.
Truth, on the other hand, harsh or sweet, looks pretty clear at any distance, with the naked eye or under a microscope.
I know my truth.
You know yours.
Can’t we just leave it that?
Sure.
If we can just leave it alone.
Truth is simple.
Not always easy, truth does have consequences. As it should, just as experiments produce unpredictable results. Telling truth has consequences for the teller as well as the told, truth never grows weary, truth never grows old. We don’t always get the result we wanted.
Telling truth, I’ve learned, isn’t as simple as saying yes or no. It should be.
If we are talking about something we don’t care about, then we are pretty tolerant of half-truth, near truth and completely distorted tripe.
Why?
Because, when we don’t care, it is too much work to insist on, demand and work at unearthing truths. But what about things that matter, people that matter?
With strangers, pretty easy. Avoidance works, not communicating works, self-serving disbursements of true parts of the whole appease conscience and avoid the lie. But when it isn’t to be avoided, there is a tendency to wrap truth avoidance in many things, not so much like masquerade costumes, but more like a magician’s close-up miss-direction using scarves, doves and card tricks.
Marketers parade truth around. As do politicians, bureaucrats, everyone who is selling something(except Hollywood purveyors of misdirection and disbelief – we KNOW they are lying, and we buy tickets and popcorn knowing that), wrapped in the appearance of wholeness, completeness – objective unvarnished view of truth, whole truth and nothing but truth.
If you say YES, I agree, you are right.
If you say POPPYCOCK, you are right.
Truth is mysterious, even in its simplicity, which it rarely is – as the avoidance of truth, disguising truth and simply keeping truth to ourselves becomes blurred and confused, and that is just in our own heads, so imagine how confusing it is for others to read us.
And who deserves to know?
Most of us have periods of our lives where truth is something we avoid in some way – but oddly, it never avoids us. It keeps steady. It may change direction, or form, but we aren’t strangers to it, because we know. And we know when we’ve not told it.
Mark Kolke
294,236
P.S.: today is parade day – kicking off Calgary’s 101st Stampede. The extravaganza’s scope is curtailed a bit, but the show, the grounds, the infrastructure repairs and state of readiness is miraculous – credit to grit, determination and ‘spend it now –figure out how to pay for it later’ hustle. Kudos to organizers, leaders, contractors and hordes of volunteers. Yahoo!, it’s parade day. Hordes will line the parade route, millions will spend 10 days hootin’, hollerin’ and stompin’ in celebration.
column written/ published from Calgary
morning walk: 12C / 54F, overcast, dampness in the air from last night’s thunderstorm, Gusta enjoying fresh-wet scents everywhere – a light jog up the hill
