It started with a NPR story. It was about people who thought they had "remembered" being abused after the memory was repressed, but then decide later on that the repressed "memory" never really happened. A day or two later I was talking with my sister, and we were talking about some events, and her memories were so very different than mine. In many ways, it didn't even sound like the same story. I knew were were talking about the same event, but her truth of it was very different than mine (a large part of this particular instance was because she was a teenager at the time and I was in my 20's... 9 years at that point of your life can really give you a different perspective). Then as I was reading the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus, Mr. Tate (the sheriff), and Scout were talking about what the "truth" was for the events of the evening (where Jem's arm got broken). So I got to thinking about what "truth" is.
If you ask Goog.le to define truth you will get:
- a fact that has been verified
- conformity to reality or actuality
- accuracy
But this still was not really helping me with my pondering. While I would love the "truth" to be more like an objective addition fact such as 2 + 2 = 4 -- there is one answer that is correct, the older I get the more situations the truth seems to be something that is more subjective. I have a very clear memory of driving home with my parents and brother late at night through a really long tunnel. It was from a relative's house that we don't go to very often. As a teenager, I asked my parents about this tunnel as it didn't make much sense. There are no tunnels (long or short) between our houses. My dad in particular told me I was crazy and I was just making it up, keeping in mind I must have been between 3-4 when this incident happened. But I was quite adamant that I was remembering this night. I described some plants that were in the front yard (I have no clue why I remembered them). Several months later, were were looking through some old photo albums of my cousin's. She had a picture of us outside from that night (it is HIGHLY unlikely I had ever seen this picture before), and the picture was how I described some of the plants very very closely. My dad decided I must have really been remembering that night, but couldn't figure out my "tunnel". A year or two later, I was driving in a different city (but a similar set up for the neighborhood), and I figured out my "tunnel". I had been looking up at the trees. In this city, trees, really old trees, line the streets. Their branches grow over the road, forming my "tunnel" when the leaves are on them. The relative's house we were at, we typically only went to their house at Christmastime, so there was never any leaves, and no "tunnel". For whatever reason, the night I remember was clearly a warm evening (as no one was wearing coats) and there were leaves on the trees. When we went home, we were driving through a "tunnel". My memory is still of driving through the tunnel, I can see it in my mind's eye, and smell the car, and feel my vinyl car seat, and that is my 3 year old "truth". Even though as an adult, I know this is not a true "fact". There is no tunnel.
Yet at the same time, some truths are facts. Some event happened at some time. Some one said some specific set of words. Then I tried to take into account people's memory of what happened, particularly when emotions are involved. The more I thought about this, the more I decided that it is when you add emotions and the individual's human experience and interpretation of events, that is when the "truth" has some difficulty being something purely objective that is correct or incorrect, and something that has at least an element of subjectivity to it.
One of my favorite quotes involves the phrase "universal truths". If there is such a thing as "universal truth" it implies there are "truths" that are not universal. This to me hits closer to what the truth is. When I want to hear the "truth", for the most part what I am wanting for is to get a persons honest version of what happened without any willful distortions/contortions/outright lies. I want to keep in mind that sometimes maybe multiple people are correct with their different stories of the same event.
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