Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Tolstoy perfectly sums up the meaning with today’s wise thought: “You can kill those who speak the truth, but once it is spoken, the truth will live forever.”
In our current political climate, the truth is hard to decipher among the many lies being told. Whom do you believe? I suppose many pick one side to take the easy way out. Believe whatever they say. But there are pitfalls to that choice, such as failing to really understand what’s being fed to you. Failing to use critical thinking to figure out the reason behind their words and their motivation.
Some people choose to close their ears and not listen to anything. Whether it be lies or the truth, they prefer silence and to live within their own bubble where they find their truth. Maybe that brings them peace, which isn’t such a bad thing, but if everyone did that, then the lies would prevail and truth would no doubt be buried under evil intent.
Tolstoy continues: “The truth is inherently simple and clear. A lie, however, is always complicated and requires endless words and excuses.”
I recall the struggle to tell the truth when I was a child. One particular time it was over a flake of hay. My horse became colicky, and when my trainer asked me why she had so much uneaten hay in her stall, I denied giving her extra even though I had gone up to the loft and thrown down a flake, thinking I was making her happy. Then he looked at me wisely and said, “We got new hay yesterday, fresh alfalfa. It probably made her stomach hurt when she ate too much..”
I was deeply ashamed to have not only lied to him but to have also made my horse sick. It was a life lesson. A lie not only can hurt your soul when you tel it because you know at the moment it’s wrong, but it can also hurt others and create many more problems.
Thankfully, he knew the truth, gave her some medicine, collected the extra hay from her stall, and she soon felt better.
Our world is filled with people who lie, and now with AI consuming our lives, it’s even harder for truth to prevail. Today, I will pause in my work and think about all that MLK did in speaking his truth and fighting for civil rights and equality. “The greatest obstacle to understanding truth is not the lie itself, but the fact that the lie tries to look like the truth.”