The Changing Truths

I spent the whole New Year’s Day thinking things over. Yes, I got a bit philosophical. Just a bit, nothing like reviewing Plato or Aristotle.

The popular sayings and maxims that people have come to wholly embrace filled my mind. It may not seem like philosophy at all. But it’s philosophy enough for non-intellectuals, like me.

I figured out that many of the concepts we hold have already gone past their original sense. And this is reflected in the truisms that we continue to assert. Many of these aren’t true anymore.

Take, for instance, the saying: “A centavo today becomes a peso tomorrow.” The adage suggests that the value of money saved grows with time. It’s no longer quite true.

With the consistent inflation these days – driven by the increasing human population and diminishing natural resources - incessantly spur inflation, causing the value of money to be on a continual decline. The amount might seem to grow, but the value of money actually shrinks.

There was a time in the recent past when rice cost less than 30 pesos a kilo. Today, a kilo of rice costs almost double than that. You need more money to buy the same amount of stuff.

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Oh, really? So eating an apple everyday is all you need to be in perfect health? What about exercise and keeping a healthy lifestyle?

Apple may provide essential nutrients for the body. But a single apple may not be sufficient to supply the body’s daily nutritional requirement. And the fruit does not give all the different vitamins and minerals that are necessary for the maintenance of total health.

Moreover, physical condition is not the only component of total health. One may be in solid physical health but have mental problems. Just the same, the doctor’s services are to be sought.

“You can’t put a good man down.” A good percentage of the people that inhabit our prisons are good people wrongly accused. They won’t be there if it’s true that a good person cannot be put down and put behind bars.

Being good is not synonymous as being perfect. Even a good man would have certain imperfections, but these do not make him bad. Repetitively harping on a good man’s few imperfections would eventually ruin his reputation. The results of the recent political surveys would attest to this.

“You can’t judge a book by its cover.” You only need to spend some time in a bookstore to know this is not true. If you see a book with a jacket that says “Ways to Cook an Eggplant,” with a picture of the vegetable, you are certainly not to mistake it as a book on rocket science.

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” I don’t know with others my age, but there have been some new things I’ve learned that I didn’t know ten years ago. And I was no longer an adolescent ten years ago, either.

True, we tend to be set in our ways after a while, and some of the ways we get set in are good. We sometimes resist learning new ways of doing the same old things, but only because our old ways are working just fine.

My neighbor’s dog is nine years old – already quite old in the lifetime of dogs. But the good animal still surprises us in the neighborhood with new tricks, every now and them. Last week he brought home several bones from the holiday feasts. Another neighbor took the effort of teaching the dog to stock up on bones.

There are many other sayings still that won’t stand up to new knowledge and realities. But, yes, a lot, too, remains true. The point is, we should continually update the concepts we hold. This is important – because the kind of life we experience depends largely on the kind of thoughts we keep.