This morning, Arash asked me why the sky is blue, and I found myself explaining about light wavelengths and atmospheric scattering. He listened with that intense focus children reserve for answers to questions they truly care about. Then he said, “But Nana told me it’s blue because that’s Allah’s favorite color.”
I paused, holding both truths in my hands like incompatible gifts.
“Which one is right, Baba?”
And there it was—the question that has followed me since I was his age, dressed in different clothes but always essentially the same: How do we navigate a world where truth feels both urgently necessary and impossibly elusive?
I told him both could be true, which satisfied him in the way it can only satisfy children who haven’t yet learned that adults expect them to choose sides. But his question haunted me for the rest of the day, because it highlighted something I’ve been trying to understand about the human condition: we are creatures who desperately seek absolute truth while simultaneously, inevitably, constructing our own versions of reality.
This isn’t hypocrisy. This is survival.
I think about this when I watch Happy arrange our small apartment. She places a flower here, adjusts a photo there, creates little corners of beauty despite our limited space and resources. She’s not decorating—she’s constructing a reality where we’re not just surviving but thriving, where our constraints become the boundaries of a life worth living rather than evidence of failure.
Is this reality “true”? Are we thriving, or are we just convincing ourselves we are? The question misses the point. The reality Happy constructs through her care, her attention, her refusal to let circumstances dictate our emotional landscape—this becomes true through the very act of construction.
We are meaning-making machines trapped in a universe that offers no built-in meaning. So we do what humans have always done: we create frameworks that allow us to function, to love, to hope, to move forward. These frameworks are both absolutely real and completely constructed. They are true because we make them true.
Last month, I met a man at a coffee shop who told me he’d been sober for five years. He spoke about his addiction with the clarity that comes from having stared into the abyss and chosen to look away. “The hardest part,” he said, “wasn’t admitting I had a problem. It was admitting that the story I’d been telling myself about my drinking—that it was creative, sophisticated, under control—was complete fiction.”
But then he talked about the story he tells himself now: that each day sober is a victory, that recovery is possible, that he’s becoming the person he was meant to be. “Is that story more true than the first one?” he asked me. “Or is it just more useful?”
This is the paradox we live in: we need truth to navigate reality, but we need constructed realities to make truth bearable. The man’s addiction was an objective fact, but his interpretation of that fact—as creative freedom or as disease, as personal failing or as medical condition—shaped his ability to respond to it. The story he chose became the reality he lived.
I think about my father, who died believing certain things about honor, duty, the proper way to live. Were his beliefs true? They guided him through seventy-three years of life, informed his decisions, shaped his character, gave him a framework for understanding right and wrong. They were true enough to build a life on. But they were also products of his time, his culture, his particular circumstances—constructions rather than discoveries.
Does this make them less valuable? When I remember his insistence on honesty, his commitment to family, his quiet dignity in the face of hardship, I’m not remembering objective truths about the universe. I’m remembering the reality he constructed through daily choices, the way he decided to interpret the world and live within that interpretation.
Arash is still young enough to believe that adults have access to some repository of absolute truth, that somewhere there’s a book or a person or a method that will reveal the final answers to all questions. I remember feeling the same way, believing that education or religion or philosophy would eventually deliver certainty.
Instead, I discovered that truth and reality exist in a complex dance. Truth provides the raw material—facts about wavelengths and atmospheric composition—but reality is what we build with that material. We take the truths we can verify and weave them into narratives that make existence possible.
This is why people can look at the same evidence and reach different conclusions. We’re not just processing information; we’re constructing frameworks that allow us to integrate that information into livable stories about who we are and what our lives mean.
The danger comes when we forget that our realities are constructed. When we mistake our interpretations for objective truth, we lose the flexibility that allows for growth, change, compassion for people who have constructed different realities from the same raw materials.
But the equal danger comes from the opposite direction—from believing that because our realities are constructed, they’re arbitrary or meaningless. The story Happy tells herself about our life together, the narrative I’ve built about fatherhood, the reality we’ve created as a family—these aren’t objective truths, but they’re not lies either. They’re something more complex: truths we’ve made true through living them.
I watch Happy teach Arash about kindness, not as an abstract concept but as a way of moving through the world. Is kindness “true”? You can’t prove it the way you can prove the wavelength of blue light. But when Arash helps an elderly neighbor with her groceries because that’s what our family reality includes, kindness becomes true in the most practical sense possible.
This is why I told Arash that both explanations for the blue sky could be true. Not because truth is relative, but because truth operates on multiple levels. There’s the truth of electromagnetic radiation and atmospheric physics, and there’s the truth of a worldview that sees the universe as intentionally beautiful, purposefully colored. These aren’t competing truths—they’re different kinds of truth serving different human needs.
We seek objective truth because we need solid ground to stand on. We construct realities because we need that ground to feel like home. The art of being human lies in doing both simultaneously—remaining open to facts that might reshape our understanding while building frameworks of meaning stable enough to support a life.
Tonight, when Arash asks me another impossible question—and he will, because children are truth-seeking machines—I’ll offer him what I can verify and help him build what he needs to make sense of it. I’ll teach him to hold certainty lightly and uncertainty bravely. I’ll show him how to construct realities that honor truth without imprisoning it.
Because this, I think, is what it means to be human: to be creatures who need both truth and story, who seek what is real while creating what is meaningful, who live in the space between what we can prove and what we choose to believe.
