Telling the Truth

June 1

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.

Morning Reading is a daily email to help center yourself, reflect, and prepare for the day. It’s sent with love from your friend, Zach in Austin, Texas. He even drew the logo himself.

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