We find ourselves at a moment when it feels like the lines between truth and lies just seem to be getting harder and harder to see. And if you ask the person doing the telling, they'll always point at someone else as the liar. Half-truth, fact-check, lie, fact-check, wash, rinse, repeat.
It wasn’t just the election of one person, or the efforts of a "biased" media — in 2019, it seems like the tools we use to discern between truth and lies have been used so little they have become rusty. Instead we gravitate toward the convenient truths and ignore the pesky ones. And as a result, we have become vulnerable to lies.
What do we do with our current crisis of truth?
Terese Mailhot, a member of the Seabird Island Band in British Columbia says consider rendering — thinking of getting to the truth as the same process you might use to reduce blubber down to whale oil.
Mailhot's powerful memoir “Heart Berries” started as a long novel that was turned into a slim memoir through rounds of edits after edits after edits. This "rendering" got her words to the heart of the matter: from small "t" truth to the essential and important big "T" truths.
This seems an important consideration for us today — that getting to the Truth is a process. A tough one, but one that leaves us better for it.
—Charles