Experiments with Truth
In November 1925 Mahatma Gandhi sat at Sabarmati Ashram near Ahmedabad. He had finished his book on South Africa, and his Gujarati weekly paper, Navajivan, needed copy every week. His coworker Swami Anand urged him to write his life story. A friend objected on a day of silence. The friend said that writing an autobiography was a Western habit, and that people might copy his mistakes if his views changed later. Mahatma Gandhi answered that he had no wish to write an autobiography. He only wanted to write about his trials with satya (SUT-yuh), which means truth.
He called the result "The Story of My Experiments with Truth". He did not treat his life as a monument or an argument that he had won. He treated it like a notebook from a laboratory. He tested food, vows, nursing, and politics on his own body, and then he recorded what happened. When an experiment failed, he put the failure on the page. Most people explain their past to show they were right all along. Gandhiji did the opposite by showing how often he had been mistaken.
Therefore
Treat your own efforts as tests rather than doctrines. When something fails to work, accept the result and change the method.
Navajivan, Ahmedabad, 1925–1929
Gandhiji wrote one chapter a week for Navajivan from November 1925 to February 1929. His secretary, Mahadev Desai, translated each chapter into English for Young India, the weekly paper Gandhiji edited in English. The account stopped at 1921 because Gandhiji felt his later public life was already well known. Navajivan published the chapters in two volumes in 1927 and 1929. The weekly installments worked because they kept him from preaching. The idea underneath was that truth is not a fixed speech you deliver to others. It is something you test in action to see if it holds.
A small reminder, on the notebook or the desk, that life works better as an experiment than as an argument.
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