Truthy… Truing… True.

It’s all stuff I think about. Pretty often.  Whatsoever things are true…  Truing past events and warding off Truthiness.   The longer I live the more I see that people would rather be -truthy- than just about anything else.  For, really,  if we are truthful, people might not like us or at least might not like what we say, do or think.  But, if on the other hand, we are truthy, we think they’ll likely “buy” our stuff.  You know… stuff like “fine, thank you, and how are you?”  If it’s true, fine. Thank you.  If it’s not true…well, then, it’s truthy.  It’s what you *want* the other person to perceive.   It’s not what’s necessarily true, but what you hope they’ll accept as truth.  Truthy.  Truthy works on most of the people most of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time.  There’re people truthy doesn’t work for.  Mothers, usually.  Mothers usually don’t buy truthy.  Well, and dad’s don’t buy truthy, either.  Usually.

Truthy is what you want people to believe or perceive about you or about what you’re saying.  I was raised with truthy.  I know truthy… and that’s probably why I hate truthy stuff today.  If you were raised with truthy, you probably hate it, too.  You know… things are completely out of control in the home and the doorbell or the phone rings: (sweet voice suddenly answers) “Helllloooo?  O, yes, wonderful…”  And on and on.  Truthy answers: Fine, thank you, when it’s anything but finethankyou.  Truthy works, though.  Truthy works because, in reality, everyone only wants to hear the finethankyou answers.  People don’t really want to hear any thing besides finethankyou, because if they hear anything other than finethankyou, they will necessarily have to do something about it… whatever it is.  Anything but finethankyou requires a thoughtful response.  Truth is, most people don’t want to deal with more than that.

But then there’s truing. Truing is what happens after the finethankyou answer is given.  People who care will get past the truthy and onto the truth by truing.  Builders use planes to true warped or twisted beams or boards and make them fit for use by truing them.  Cyclists “true” spokes of wheels by truing.  They set them in balance to eliminate wobbles or bumpy rides—and to protect from or prevent damage to the wheel.  The truth is in the ride.  I think that truing sort of needs to happen when it’s obvious that the finethankyou answer is, well, truthy.  But you know… it takes someone who cares enough to do some truing to get past the truthy and get to the truth.  Those are the people we probably trust enough to allow some truing of our warped answer or our out-of-balance answer.   But then, there’s gotta be trust to allow that to happen.  It starts not with truthy, but with truth.