Two Things Can Be True

Two Things Can Be True

Sunset at Agbani, Enugu State.

I used to be an absolutist. Fully, unapologetically, exhaustingly so.

For me, there was never a middle ground. It was either this or that, right or wrong, good or bad. No overlap, no grey, no room for nuance. These days, I now understand that there can be black, white, grey…heck, even pink!

The older I get, the more I realize how much of the world I was folding up just to make it fit inside my certainty. I don’t even fully understand where that came from. Maybe it felt safer and more honest. But it was also quite a lazy way to think.

Here is what I know now: multiple truths can coexist. And that sentence sounds simple until you actually try to live by it.

Living by this belief means sitting with discomfort and accepting that your experience, however real and valid, is not the whole story. That someone else’s truth, different from yours, maybe even opposite to yours, is true as well, but does not cancel yours out. The presence of one truth does not diminish the other. It just means the world is bigger than either of you.

And the world is big. There are billions of people on this planet, billions of histories, billions of wounds and joys and ways of making meaning. Why would we ever expect one perspective to be the definitive one? Yet here we are; in our politics, our relationships, our governance, our faith, insisting on one truth to exist solely.

How many times have we watched a beloved figure, someone who genuinely feeds the poor, pays school fees, shows up for the vulnerable, get exposed for something deeply troubling? And how quickly do our communities fracture into two camps, those who say he is good and those who say he is corrupt, each side fighting to cancel out the other?

But what if both are true? What if this person has done genuine good and caused genuine harm? What if holding both of those realities at the same time is not betrayal but simply honesty?

When we insist on absolutes, we are protecting ourselves from the discomfort of complexity. We are choosing the clean story over the true one. And that choice has consequences. It makes accountability nearly impossible. It makes us worse at judgment, not better. It makes us defensive of people and ideas that would benefit far more from our honest examination.

Opening your mind to the possibility that two truths can coexist is one of the most courageous things a person can do, because it requires you to hold tension without resolving it too quickly. It requires staying in the difficult, honest middle a little longer.

I am still learning this. Some days I do it well. Some days I catch myself reaching for the absolute again because it just feels easier.

But I am no longer convinced that easy is what we need.

Be open. Hold complexity. Let two things be true.