What is true and what is false? Who is telling the truth and who is lying? Does truth exist? Do lies exist? Whose truth is the real truth?

So many questions, so many unknowns. How does it all work?

Is a pear growing on a quince tree the truth, a half-truth, a falsehood, or a lie?

After all, “pear” is really just the common name we give to a fruit. We could just as easily call it a duck’s butt.

So, here’s how I see it, according to my own truth.

Each of us has our own opinion about every subject and every situation. It comes from our upbringing and our experiences.

Someone talks about something, let’s say a pear, and is convinced that what they’re saying is true. Someone else listens and disagrees because they’re filtering what they hear through their own beliefs and experiences. To them, the truth looks completely different, even though the subject, the pear, seems to be the same.

If one person doesn’t ask questions and the other doesn’t explain what they mean, the result will be a misunderstanding, hurt feelings, or accusations of manipulation, lying, or dishonesty.

But what if someone has never seen a pear in their life? To them, the idea of a pear growing on a quince tree or a flowering quince tree might seem perfectly true. But to someone who “knows” that pears grow on pear trees, that same information would be an obvious lie.

On the other hand, does a fruit commonly called a pear, simply because of its shape, have to grow on only one kind of tree? And which tree did it first grow on? And is that manipulation already?

And once again, if we take what we hear personally instead of asking questions and explaining our points of view, well, the result is hurt feelings, judgments, accusations, and so on.

To sum up: there are as many truths and lies as there are living beings!!!

Each of us thinks DIFFERENTLY about EVERY subject. So it’s absurd, pure madness even, to assume that we understand someone else, or that someone else understands us, or anyone else for that matter.

So, don’t assume anything. Explain yourself as clearly as you can. Don’t expect people to just figure out what you mean. If you don’t understand something, ask questions instead of pretending you know everything and then lying awake at night, drowning in your own assumptions, sometimes for years, wondering what someone really meant.

Thanks so much for reading.

Published
24.03.2021 
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Dorota Sznyterman-Łabęcka