June 1 | Telling the Truth

In the final scene of the heavy handed kids movie, the protagonist comes clean, admitting the tiny lie they told at the start of the episode that has spiraled into a horrible situation. “Telling the truth” becomes a matter of simply expressing a set of circumstance in which we made a mistake, positioned as the correct-if-difficult choice we must make in similar situations.

But then comes the situations where the truth is not so simple. It suddenly becomes slippery—not just a matter of admitting you broke your parents favorite porcelain plate or stole Tommy’s baseball glove, but trying to wrap words around a thing important and foreign.

The Persians said they raised their children to “shoot the bow and tell the truth”, a phrase that rings more of the second kind of truth telling than the simple moralized first. The heavy, physical act of taking up words, drawing them back with a ferocious intent, and letting them loose at a small target, always moving, ever around you and ever impossible to pin down, the truth.

Truth always around you, just waiting for someone to tell it.… Read the rest