The Nature of Truth

When you're a kid you're taught the value of truth. It's impressed upon you how important it is to always tell the truth. You're bombarded with moral tales that illustrate how the kid who tells the lie always loses and gets punished while the kid who is honest is rewarded. Even when you've done something wrong you're supposed to be honest and own up to it. For most kids being honest when you've done something wrong means a punishment of some sort.

As you get older the nature of truth becomes more and more clouded. You're introduced to "little white lies" which is supposed to be a lie that is told to protect - a loving lie. When white lies are
discussed they are always in the context of some noble situation in which someone is being
self-sacrificing. In real life, situations that call for lies are rarely noble.

I'm not a perfect person and I have lied but all my life I have endeavored to be a truth-teller. The truth has always been important to me. For a lot of my life I had relatives and friends that would tell me lies because they thought it was what I wanted to hear. They didn't want me to be altered by the truth. They didn't want my fantasies to be destroyed by real life. These lies did not help me nor did they protect me from change or reality.

As I get older I come to respect the truth and the people who can tell it more and more. As hard as it is to tell it's just as hard to listen to it and really hear it. Accepting the truth that someone
tells you means you have to willing to let go of whatever preconceived ideas you have about whatever it is that their truth shoots down. You have to be open to it.

The problem is that most people aren't willing to hear the truth. They would much rather go on
believing the lies than face the fact that their reality is false. Jack Nicholson's line in a Few
Good Men "You can't handle the truth!" has never been more relevent.

I've learned that for me the most difficult thing in life is to learn to withold what I know to be
true. I've discovered that most of the people I love and care about cannot handle the truth. They want to go on believing the lies that they have built around them. It completely breaks my heart to see them struggle and hurt and make bad decisions all in the name of avoiding the truth.
Despite what many of my family and friends think of me I've always been someone who expects the truth. I don't want to be lied to and I can face the truth. Truth hurts. It really hurts a lot sometimes but so do a lot of things in life. It's just another way in which we all learn.

There are things that really burn inside that I wish I could just spit out at the people who need to hear them. These are valuable pieces of the puzzles they are all trying to put together. The problem is these people have proved themselves incapable of handling them. They would reject them just as soon as I got a chance to voice them.

They are both awful situations because they are so life altering. The decisions they make based on these lies are going to affect them for the rest of their lives. In reality, both of these people
have already made their choices based on what they choose to believe. As a result they have set
themselves as well as others up for a bigger mess in the future.

A lot of the damage is already done but there are things that could be prevented if they just faced the truth now. The thing is I have been told by many people that I cannot help. That I do not have the right to speak what I know to be the truth. That it is something they have to discover for themselves.

It is the most difficult thing to do is watch someone struggle and beat their head against the wall
and be unable to help them. I hate this. So much for the truth being so prized.