On Truth

This morning, I found myself wondering about truth.

Not in a big, philosophical way at first, but quietly, almost in passing.

The thought carried me back to my university days, to a philosophy unit I once took alongside psychology, and to a question that seemed simple at the time and yet never really left me:

What is truth?

And how, if at all, is it different from fact?

I remember a lecturer talking about facts as things we often assume to be fixed. Observable. Provable.

He used an example like the sun rising and the sun setting.

And even then, it already felt less solid than it sounded.

The sun isn’t actually rising or setting at all. It’s the earth rotating. What we experience as a fact depends on where we are standing.

Even scientific facts, as careful and rigorous as they are, seem to live within frameworks.

They are shaped by methods, interpretations, probabilities, and the questions we ask at a particular moment in time.

Patterns emerge.

Theories strengthen.

Understandings evolve.

And still, they are filtered through human observation.

I don’t know if that makes them any less valuable.

But it does make me pause.

Truth, at least as I experience it, doesn’t feel fixed.

It feels alive.

What feels true for me today may not feel true tomorrow. And when that happens, I don’t experience it as a failure or a contradiction.

More as a sign that something in me has shifted, learned, or softened.

At the same time, there are certain truths that seem to return again and again.

Not as ideas I’ve decided on, but as experiences I keep meeting.

One of mine is yoga.

Anyone who has spent time here will probably know that yoga is a reflective space for me. It’s physical and embodied. Sometimes spiritual, sometimes very ordinary.

And what I keep noticing is this: when I go to yoga, I almost always feel better afterwards.

The same seems to be true when I swim in the ocean.

That doesn’t make it a universal truth.

It doesn’t need to be.

It simply feels true for me.

Over time, these experiences begin to form a kind of inner knowing.

Not a rule, but a quiet reminder.

When I move away from the things that nourish me, I eventually feel it.

And when I return, something settles again.

Things feel more complex when we move beyond ourselves and into relationships, families, communities, and larger systems.

Suddenly there is not just my truth, but yours.

And often, an unspoken tension around whose truth matters more, or whose carries more weight.

This is where I find myself thinking about greed, though I’m not even sure that’s the right word.

Sometimes what we label as greed might actually be the echo of not having had enough.

Enough safety.

Enough care.

Enough stability.

Enough choice.

When something essential has been missing for a long time, the body and mind don’t necessarily relax just because resources appear.

They may keep reaching, holding, accumulating, unsure whether what is here will last.

From the outside, this can look like excess.

From the inside, it may feel like survival.

And then there are those who have had enough, or even more than enough, and still experience a sense of emptiness.

As if no amount of more can touch what is actually missing.

Perhaps because what was needed was never something that could be acquired in the first place.

I don’t know.

These are just things I find myself wondering about.

It seems to me that a lot of conflict, both personal and collective, arises not because someone is wrong, but because someone feels unseen or unheard in their experience.

I sometimes wonder what might shift if we held truth a little more gently.

If we could say, this feels true for me right now, without needing it to become the only truth in the room.

If truth were something we shared, rather than something we defended.

I don’t think truth is meant to be static.

Or final.

I think it’s something we live into, revise, return to, and sometimes let go of.

And perhaps, in allowing space for multiple truths, we also allow a little more compassion.

For ourselves.

For others.

For the ways people have learned to survive, adapt, and make sense of their lives with what they were given, or not given.

As I sit with this, I notice how truth rarely arrives for me as a clean answer.

More often, it shows up as a sensation.

A soft yes in the body.

A quiet no.

A sense of ease, or tension, or something gently asking for my attention.

So I’ll leave this here, as an open-ended wondering.

What feels quietly true for you right now, even if you can’t fully explain it?

Is there something in your life that consistently brings you back to yourself?

And what might change if your truth didn’t need to be certain, finished, or defended, but could simply be held, for now?

***

Truth

The English word truth comes from the Old English trēowþ, meaning faithfulness, trust, reliability.

It was not originally about being correct.

It was about being true to something, to a person, a promise, a way of living. Truth was relational. Something you could lean on. Something that held.

Later, through Latin influence, truth became linked to veritas, meaning that which is factual, accurate, provable.

Slowly, something shifted.

Truth moved from the realm of relationship into the realm of judgement.

From can I trust this?

to is this right or wrong?

In that shift, truth hardened.

What was once alive, responsive, and contextual became something to defend, argue, and win. Something to possess rather than inhabit.

And yet, the older meaning still lives quietly underneath.

In the body.

In experience.

In the sense of alignment when something feels true, even before it can be explained.

Perhaps truth was never meant to be fixed.

Perhaps it was meant to be faithful, something we return to, revise, and learn to hold with care.