The truth: who gets to decide what it actually is?

This might be something that keeps you awake at night. When you are holding an emotional conundrum as a burden within your own heart, who gets to decide what that, as the title suggests, actually is?

How it breaks down

There will always be different versions of what the truth is, because they are largely drawn from different perspectives.

In the same way, they are measured by different emotional and psychological origins and experiences, and also by what is fundamentally relatable to us as individuals. This depends, to a degree, on what time of life we are in, such as childhood, youth, midlife and later life, and the way we were and have been shaped by our experiences as we age. Consequently, we review not only the truth, but our truth and the need to know the truth.

This all depends so much, I have come to realise, on what really matters to us as individuals, but it is also, somehow, undeniably measured by truth. The truth.

Societal truth

As a seeker, I have always been drawn to discover its absolute. For this, we have laws. These are sometimes divided across different parts of the world and managed and enforced by legal systems that uphold them. If they are disobeyed, there are consequences. These are, whether we like them or not, straightforward and less apocryphal because they are written and laid down for us.

Emotional truth

But what about our emotional true north? The calling of our own heart. What speaks to us from our conscience and the fundamental part of who we are. 

Somehow, this is so much more complex, and harder to navigate, when we're told one thing and yet doubt it, struggle with it, or can't deny it doesn’t fit. Where we might live in fear of the consequences? Where do we live here, with what is such internal unrest and doubt? Some say by way of trust. But what if you find trusting difficult or impossible? 

Unanchored, we feel unsure when upholding what we believe to be true means letting go of something or someone we love. This is a very hard place to reside. Where we can feel torn and separated from the beating of our own heart.

Whether this is connected to our relationships with others or the dynamics of our own circumstances, some of us struggle more with the truth and how it measures up for us. Not to mention the trust.

Worry and doubt 

This often shows up in estrangement, where love was, and might still be longed for, or still is, as to whether our own cri de coeur, our passionate outcry, our heartfelt appeal or anguished protest such as the definition implies, calls out to us internally, to be heard, when it is in spite of what we are being offered.

It draws a line around the hopeless thought that it might be silenced by another’s actions or inaction, even though we might so deeply not wish it to be so. I think this depends on what we can live with, and what we cannot live without. That is what we are left with when the truth may lie with a hypothetical jury that seems perpetually out. Even if it is our own.

Though it is in the absence of the move to reconcile with another, who we feel has wronged us, that we might choke on, making it hard to collude with them, when it is this absence that makes resolve seem impossible, and sleep does not come at the end of our day, but instead nights of wondering how important the truth actually is when there is no peace.

It also asks how little, if anything, is worth holding onto a truth if the love we feel has to be surrendered for a paragon. In this absence of resolve, or its potential, whose paragon wins the day, and is that really important? I think it is, but there is a price to pay, and in living that price, we can become lost.

How to find peace 

How can we do this with or without the truth, though? If we live outside its understood parameters, we can do so through our own convictions, which should bring us clarity, if not peace at the very least. But clarity isn't peace; it is more about principle, and maybe even pride. Is it not said that pride comes before a fall?

Maybe the fall is in some way a fall from grace, and that has nothing peaceful about it because it is isolating. Maybe where principles can feel like an empty cup left to hold. Maybe, while we still believe our conclusion is finite, we have time to steer clear of a loss that might become too much to bear.

Where truth may be found 

I think truth may live where peace can be found, when we are and feel allied. We are wired to belong, and in alliance, belonging is felt through being upheld by others' care. 

We can find this in friendship, sometimes in family, and also through religious beliefs that offer community when we might be struggling with the truth, or with others' versions of it that you have to live with, and sometimes own, even if you don't wish them to be so.

When you are feeling judged and misunderstood because the distance of what is your own truth, or desired truth, is either denied or ridiculed or fundamentally not even on the table as a consideration, then the balm of welcome, no matter what, that kind of acceptance, allows peace in both the storm and the impasse. Kindness offers a resting place through acceptance, and through being accepted.

The hope

Hope is so necessary, so important if we are searching for meaning and truth. Hope for understanding, hope for being understood, or the curiosity it takes to make another’s consideration possible. When doors open, the flow of what might become is offered up in agreement and mutuality, rather than what is felt as “the never”.

I think this can depend so much upon what influence or influences are at bay. If you are dealing with another’s nihilism or disdain, that will unfortunately be governed by their own misaligned convictions. Then all the wishing it were different will be the enemy of hope, and all its hoping will stand in its way. If influences are corrupt or corrupted by anger, they will uphold a narrative that is not interested in emotional fealty.

Faith versus resignation

When we struggle with the truth, or with what we fear or imagine it to be, we need, if we can, to find faith. Faith is the friend of hope, and we need to know where we may dig to find it.

If you have faith, you are blessed by its harbour, whether religious or from another source of goodness and belief; faith is a resting place during times of search or struggle for the truth, and it lets you live peacefully within yourself.

Morals and values

Our morals and values are meant to be the most ardent advocates of truth. This l think is very relatable to the vast majority of us as individuals. Much like a sovereign country, an independent political entity has the absolute authority to govern itself without external interference. It also must have the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states.

In a similar way, if we possess a value system we truly believe in, if that is our hallmark of truth, then within that system we surely believe in justice as fundamental. This then provokes us to both allow and make room for another’s story to stand next to ours without perceiving it as a threat.

I think that it is this making room for others’ truth by way of love that will ultimately be able to combine both truth and peace, and our truth and our peace, so that we are anchored in a wholeness that can sustain us, alongside the truth of others, and then the truth is felt as grace.