The Truth is Not Irrelevant

Margaret Atwood’s startling statement at the end of the 2019 National Film Board of Canada documentary detailing her life landed on my head as I scurried to my computer to write “The Truth is Not Irrelevant”. Whatever you think of her or her writing, one thing is certain: she is a master at putting words together that make her point like an arrow finding its bull’s-eye.

Could this be the mantra for our time now? On all sides, we are being asked to suspend truth, to take as gospel the “truth” of the loudest and most frequent speaker, to forget the truth, especially if it’s an inconvenient truth from the mists of history. And those mists are growing murkier.

I could literally feel a rabbit hole full of questions threatening to swallow me whole. What is truth? How can we tell if we’ve heard the truth? When is a truth the truth? Have we forgotten how to discern the truth? The questions lining up to be answered were endless. For example, I could tell you the sky is blue. That is true, but there are also white clouds interspersed in that blue sky. When I look in the opposite direction, over the mountains, there are ominous-looking dark clouds. If you only tell me the first statement without the other two, you have told me a partial truth. That makes the first truth a half-truth which, to my mind, makes it a lie of omission. It’s a common practice in sales and politics.

How then do we discern what the truth is? I’ve experienced discernment as a knowing that causes a chain reaction between my brain and heart before synching with my soul. It’s a palpable feeling when it lands and then registers in my heart as truth. It’s sometimes referred to as an intuitive hit. That’s what caused us to move provinces from Alberta back to B.C. My husband and I were thinking seriously of moving to Calgary, but he called me suddenly from Calgary and said he knew we should move to B.C. instead. Hearing the urgency and feeling the certainty in his voice as my heart registered his words as truth, I agreed. His intuitive hits have always proved to be true. My mother died from Alzheimer’s disease five years after we moved to B.C. and my transformation journey expanded.

Another kind of truth is what I call the “raw truth”. Children are raw truth-tellers before they learn how to say what they mean in a socially acceptable way. As a young girl in grade three, I overheard a teacher talking with another teacher about leaving our small, rural school. It shocked me and I told my mom about it. It didn’t register I was eavesdropping on a conversation not meant for my ears. A few days later our principal, whom I adored, called an assembly of all students and teachers. She’d never done that before, so I was afraid something bad was happening. As she delivered her message, her eyes flashed and her back stood as straight as the school’s well-built cement walls. She didn’t have to raise her voice; she embodied a force that flew straight at me:

Someone in our school is spreading a rumour that a teacher in our school is leaving us. I would like this opportunity to remind all of us that overhearing something that is meant for one or two other people is not permission to tell others what you heard. It is not your information to share. No teacher is leaving this school.

My sensitive heart shrank in horror that I had done something so horrible. She knew it was me because my pale face turned bright red. Although my face always turned bright red even at the suggestion of something I might have done wrong. I remembered the time I was asked by a customs officer if I had purchased anything in the U.S. I said no, which was the truth, and immediately turned bright red. He looked at me funny and let us through. All of my teenage friends had purchased new jeans and were wearing them underneath their other pants, but not me. I couldn’t tell a lie and couldn’t purchase the coveted jeans. From my adult vantage point, silence or the truth not told makes one complicit in a lie.

When someone says to me now that something is true for them, implying they own their truth and it might not be a truth for me, I am left with the same squirming discomfort I felt with the customs officer. If I can find three or more direct contradictions to what anyone says, including me, it’s enough to suggest we dig a little deeper for answers. Here’s where more research, knowledge of history, or broad reading helps. Still, with so many opposing viewpoints online that support whatever you want to believe, the group shouting the loudest and most frequently is more likely to be believed. Isn’t a whispered truth still the truth?

I was searching the internet for examples of a whispered truth when I came across an essay that reminded me of my transformation journey. (Roger Kirkness Truth Whispers) In the beginning, I heard whispering sounds I couldn’t quite decipher, followed by a strong yearning that caused me to research what my passion and purpose were. I challenged my beliefs, reset old patterns, scrutinized my biases, and dealt with lurking, destructive shadows, all because I listened to the whispers. It was the beginning of a long search for the truth about this human named Alice. The search was worth it and I found much more than my soul-led purpose.

One of the most transformative events of my life was finally realizing I loved myself unconditionally, and in that moment, remembering who I was. The highest form of truth leading us humans to discover or remember who we are is love. (@wholisticbyang) In that remembering, we recover unconditional love for ourselves and others.

Mantra for our time? I couldn’t find a better one than Margaret Atwood’s “the truth is not irrelevant,” because the truth is an arrow finding its bull’s-eye, and it always finds its way.