On Truth

I don’t know what the truth is anymore. Some days I suspect I never did. It shifts beneath my feet like a riverbank after a long rain, familiar one moment, rearranged the next. I reach for it the way a child reaches for a dragonfly—certain that if I just move fast enough, close my fingers tightly enough, I can finally hold something still. But truth, it seems, was never meant to be caught.

Perhaps we were never meant to know truth in the way we know the route to the grocery store or the password to an old email account. Perhaps we are only meant to glimpse it as it moves past us, luminous and fleeting, like sunlight flickering through leaves. A flash. A feeling. Gone before we can name it.

There is an old wisdom that places kindness before honesty, as if to say: before you go announcing what you believe to be true, first ask whether it harms. Only then does truthfulness follow—not as a blunt instrument, but as a discipline of care. And yet even then, the question presses in: whose truth are we talking about? Yours? Mine? The one we believed yesterday but quietly abandoned this morning?

Maybe the deeper question is whether clinging to any fixed truth is what causes us the most suffering of all.

Truth, when you look closely, behaves less like a monument and more like water. It flows. It erodes. It reshapes the landscape without asking permission. We keep trying to dam it, label it, bottle it, sell it back to ourselves in neat sentences that begin with this is how it is. But life has never shown much respect for our declarations.

Take the way we speak our most solemn promises. Standing in borrowed finery, hands trembling, we say things like always and forever as if they are sturdy objects we can hand to one another. I will love you. I will trust you. I will stay. Until death does us part.

We need these words. I think that’s important to say out loud. We need them. They are less about predicting the future and more about soothing the fear that crouches quietly in the back of the room. They are vows of intention, not guarantees of outcome. A commitment to kindness, to showing up as best we can, even while knowing—if we’re honest—that we are fallible, changeable creatures standing on shifting ground.

We tell ourselves these truths because we long for safety. We want to know what’s coming next. We want assurances that something will last, that what is spoken will remain real tomorrow, and the day after that. Sometimes, if I’m very honest, I almost wish to be deceived—just a little—so I can cling to the comfort of a fixed story, one where the lines don’t blur and the ending is known. But life refuses to cooperate.

The truths we once swore by fade quietly into the background, replaced by new ones that arrive without apology. We forget what we once promised, or we remember and find we’ve become someone else entirely. The river keeps moving. And if there is any truth we can grasp at all, it may be this: change is not a betrayal. It is the way things stay alive.

Still, I won’t pretend this realization is comforting. There is fear in it. There is grief. If truths are temporary, what do we hold onto? If love shifts, if certainty dissolves, if even our deepest beliefs are provisional, where do we rest?

Perhaps the answer is not in holding at all.

There is another old idea—quiet, almost subversive—that suggests freedom comes not from controlling outcomes, but from releasing our grip on them. From loosening our attachment to what our words produce, to how our actions are received, to the stories we tell ourselves about how things should unfold. To step out of the exhausting tug-of-war between opposites: right and wrong, success and failure, truth and falsehood.

This is where I stumble. I struggle to release truth, because it was never mine to begin with. I struggle to release fear, love, sadness—each one feeling so personal, so intimate, and yet, on closer inspection, borrowed. Passing through. Visitors who mistake themselves for permanent residents.

None of them belong to me. None of them ever did.

So maybe the invitation is simpler, and harder, than finding the truth. Maybe it is to ride it. To stand on the surfboard of this changeable life, knees bent, heart open, knowing we will fall, knowing we will get back up, knowing another wave is already forming behind us.

Let life move as it always has. Let go when the current pulls. Catch the next wave when it comes. Then the next. And the next.

What is the truth?

Maybe it’s not something we can possess. Maybe it’s something we practice—moment by moment—through kindness, through humility, through the courage to admit I don’t know, and the grace to keep living anyway.

Hari Om Tat Sat