It takes courage to be a truth teller. It takes a person unwilling to settle for less than the truth. It takes a person who is willing, perhaps unknowingly at first, to stand alone. A truth teller is a story teller, and true story tellers can’t and don’t lie or speak in what I consider “shades of gray.” They speak with honesty and courage. Courage that at times has to be “grown into.” This courage sets a truth teller apart from others in a very distinct way. An aloneness that only another truth teller feels and experiences and can relate too. A threat to others? Perhaps. Truth tellers expose what is not true. Much like the light of a lamp exposes dust. Some people don’t want dust exposed, it reminds them that some house cleaning needs to be done. And house cleaning can be hard work. Most don’t want to do it.
The catch with being a truth teller is this: You can’t go backwards or pretend that nothing but the truth is all right. “Shades of gray” do not exist because they are no better than a blatant lie. Lies are not even in the psychological make-up of a truth teller, thus the loneliness. Many people live in the world of “gray” or the world of a “little white lie” as they call it and are all right with that. Thus the isolation for a truth teller. A truth teller exposes this. A truth teller speaks truth only. Unfortunately, people, or at least a lot of people I think, do not want to be around this level of honesty. At least not for an extended period of time.
If the world had more truth tellers we would live in a better world. An honest world. A world where nothing is placated or hidden or kept secret, and illusions of truth do not exist. That is a fantasy I know, but it is true. I have walked the path of a truth teller for quite sometime now. I have had to make peace with the aloneness that at times it can cause. And I have had to grow into my courage not to back down from truth telling. The road is not an easy one all the time, but when I look around, to other human beings and to nature in a compare and contrast kind of way, I can’t help but think nature has it more right than the human specie. Nature, and all that nature entails, does not lie. Perhaps that is why I am most comfortable in nature. There is no falsity or reading between the lines of nature. You do not have to guess with nature. It acts and does in honest truth, whether we, as humans like it or not. To the truth teller I say this: keep telling and speaking the truth regardless of the outcome because when our 60 seconds comes around, we won’t have any regrets.
