Can A Truism Be Untrue?

 "There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism."

---G. K. Chesterton

This quote has been floating around on my desk for a few months. I tore it out of a magazine and stuck it to my "vision board," which is a fancy name for a piece of cork and a confetti-like collection of sticky notes, scraps of articles, and fortune cookie messages.

I made some notes on using it here, but the same question kept popping into my head: "Who decides if a 'truism' is true?" For sure, I know it isn't me. If only it were, some fundamental changes would happen, but I'm not yet Queen of the Universe. Is any "truth" ever an absolute?

We have a dictionary for individual words, but what about when we string a bunch of words together to form a statement? It gets more complicated then, and right now, more than ever, finding real truth is both more difficult and more important. Honestly, look around you. Do we have the luxury now of having more than one definition of truth? Of course, there will always be shades of reality, and absolutes are few and far between, but there are too many statements that we call truisms that aren't even close. Here are a few.

1. Nothing good happens after midnight. Without going into too much detail, it's never been true for me or my core group of friends from high school, college, and a few girls' trips. One poor little country girl goes from a wicked stepmother to a royal ball at the palace, and now midnight is some arbitrary line of demarcation between a lovely evening and a disaster? Nope, not buying that, sorry. What about time zones? Which midnight are we talking about? What about babies born in the middle of the night? What about all the nurses and doctors who save lives on overnight shifts? Not every patient will survive, but many do, and we should celebrate those events. I usually hear this from parents worried about curfew for their teenagers, and to them, I would say, "Your head would explode if you knew about some of what happens in school, after school, and right after the library closes at 9 pm."

2. Practice makes perfect. That is so not true. If it were, I would be the world's leading authority on how to annoy people on social media. My preference is to believe that I am the leading authority on that, but it will always remain a matter of opinion. What isn't in doubt is that Pythagoras himself could come down from Zeus, or wherever Ancient Greeks go for an afterlife and tutor me every day for a year; I still will never be able to solve for X or understand statistics, probability or even just Algebra 1.

No one, ever, anywhere, is "perfect." Practice will bring proficiency, and even that isn't a guarantee because we all know at least a few people who practice daily at something and are far from proficient, much less perfect. Anyone who has been to a middle school band concert knows this, but who wants perfection from the brass section of an 8th-grade orchestra? It's about the process of learning, not getting every note just right. A friend who is a music teacher often quotes Henry Van Dyke, who said, "The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.

3.Don't look back; you're not going that way. My father made this his life motto but would always add, "Especially you, Brenda, you'll fall over." During his life, I never argued the point with him, since he was correct about me falling. However, I can walk forward, eyes front, on flat, dry pavement, in daylight and still trip over nothing. I was twelve years old the first time he told me this, but now that I'm way older than that? Looking back at where I've been has been helpful at times, if only as a stark reminder of what not to do. I'd give anything to sit across from him now and debate this.

Do truisms exist? That's a question that will probably never have a solid answer, but maybe there is one for me: "Things change." I believe that is always true. We best be ready for it.