Someone said to me recently that there is your truth, there is my truth and then there is ‘The Truth’. It sounded like some innocuous statement, which sounds so profound after you have had heady mix of cocktails at 3 in night while trying to dissuade sleep from encroaching your drunken state; and then when you are sober the next morning, it just sticks with you.
It kinda stuck with me and mulling over it at every given possibility, I realized that truth could not really come in triplets. Truth could not be changed as per our convenience, like oh! this truth suits me so let me live with it and oh! this one is quite painful, well let me just discard it. Therefore, the difference was clear, my truth and your truth were convenience oriented while the real truth was the truth. It was that blood sucking vampire truth, which would kill you, ask for every ounce of your energy to acknowledge it and indeed, to act upon it would require so much more strength mentally.
There are so many decisions that one takes, which are required to be based on truth. As a matter of fact decisions should ideally be based on truth but increasingly, I have realized that decisions are based on convenient truth, which may be borderline lie.
Case in point being the morality clause upon which the society functions. Chastity, promiscuity – antonyms but with similar connotations; some thing which may look as rather chaste to one may seem to be promiscuous to the other. We can choose our own definition of truth and its different variants in order to mold the morality that fits us just fine. So the interpretation of truth varies for us but the actual truth stands exactly where it is. And in the heart of hearts, we acknowledge the actual truth but are just very happy living with our convenient truth.
So then the question arises as to how this journey from ‘my truth’ to ‘the truth’ is completed or is it ever embarked upon? In my experience, we all find our path. Some of us ignore it; some of us follow it while others still would live in a state of numbness, completely oblivious to the existence of such truth.
I have no clear-cut solution on how to find the actual truth. For all I know, I may never find it. But I choose to believe in the goodness of truth and that hopefully one day- it will show me the way.
Pallavi Pratap 