by SEG

Created on: March 27, 2010   Last Updated: August 25, 2011

There's that simple word again, truth, and every once in a while that word, like some elusive mammal burrowing around in our back yard sticks its head up through a hole in the ground and everyone runs after it. If we could only get our hands on it we might be able to find out exactly what it is.

And for thousands of years philosophers have tried to do just that- 'get their hands on it'. 

But we can’t always get our hands on it because truth isn’t something that sits still through time like an object we can hold in our hands; we become so accustomed to the objective truths that do sit still in our minds that we forget that our understandings of life are predominantly composed of the relationships between those obvious truths, and as we grow older our perceptions of ‘objective truths’ and their complex relationships expand.

Truth becomes our conceptual solutions to increasingly complex situations- uniquely complex experiences that philosophers cannot address for us.

I went to a race track once that I'd been told had a lot of action on it, but when I got there the place was so quite you could have heard a horse puck hit the ground, if there had been any horses there that is.

No horses in the chutes, no crowds in the stands; all I could detect were some slight movements up in a high tower so I climbed up a long stairway toward them.

There in that tower high above the stands, in the comfort of an air-conditioned room behind thick glass panes, was a small group of studious people. There they sat apart from the experience of living, quietly discussing the strengths and weaknesses of words in the breeding of thoroughbred ideas, philosophical concepts they called them.

Fascinated, I stayed for a while, watching and listening, waiting for something to happen. Nothing  did happen; no horses, no crowds, nothing. I finally left when I realized the starting gates were never going to spring open, the race was never going to start.

From down the road a dull rumbling got my attention and I went that way.

Here it was!

Exuberant people jammed the rails with betting tickets in hand as the starting gates shot open to a riotous roar of excitement; loudspeakers blared, people screamed and the race was on!

This is real life in action.

This is where words describe real things and real people in motion; this is where the word truth has meaning when describing human thoughts, passions and excess- in motion.

The race barrels around a turn with flying dirt and froth mixed with the thick presence of destruction. Boxed in by screaming crowds in passions of contest and greed, theft and fraud, hopes and dreams it can all come crashing through the rails in an instant act of finality, death.

End of the race.

We don't have forever in this world to dally with this and that; we can't always sit around and split words into analytical pieces so small you need an intellectual microscope to see them; life sweeps us along at its own pace, not ours, leaving the perfections of philosophical thoughts behind as alien to the imperfections of human life in action.

Truth does not sit still nor do we; there are truths and lies and deceptions and thefts; we make mistakes- but the truth of the matter of our individual life is always this: are we in proximity to lies or to mistakes?

Truth as a word does not reflect the complex reality of our forward motion; the truth in each of us is in our intentions- not our words.

There's some truth; some.

Learn more about this author, SEG.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.