All good people know it's a good thing to tell the truth. That's part
upbringing and (if you've really listened to
Life itself)
mostly intuition. Everyone knows it's a good thing to not tell lies
(well ... almost everyone) which is what I learned / was
taught at a very early age. I learned that making things up which
didn't happen, and then saying them as if they happened,
doesn't fit with what it is to be a good human being. Yet the thing
about telling the truth as I learned it, was I didn't know exactly what
"the truth" was. If you'd asked me back then to define "the truth", it
would have been above my pay grade. What I did know (or assumed to be
so) was that telling the truth means there's consistency between /
congruency with what really happened, and what I say happened (in
practicality, that's
good enough for
jazz).
Later I began noticing an
inexorably
widening gap between what really happened, and what I say happened. I
don't mean I began telling lies as a matter of course (although in all
honesty, I did catch myself bending / embellishing the truth on
occasion - kind of like an experiment to see how far I
could push the truth without becoming an abject liar). No, I mean that
without
being rigorous
(which I discovered later in my adult years), there was often a
skew in what I said happened, away from what really
happened. I began seeing it in the smallest, supposedly most innocuous
statements. And yes, you can gauge your expediency with the truth in
the smallest statements - like how you answer the question "How are
you?". When it comes to telling the truth, what you say is true ... or
it isn't. There's no gray area.
To flesh out the example further, if I ask you "How are you?", you may
unhesitatingly answer "Fine" or "OK" or "Well". Does it
matter that such answers aren't always true? It does. How
many times do we answer "Fine" or "OK" or "Well" in response to "How
are you?" when it's not true? And watch: it's not merely that it's not
true: it's that it's become de rigueur with us to be OK
with it when it's not true.
"Fine" or "OK" or "Well" as responses to "How are you?" when they're
not true, isn't exactly
earth-shattering.
But it is remarkable when we consider how expedient we are with the
truth, how we've assumed the truth is fudge-able, how we've
assumed it's OK to embellish it. Untrue answers to "How are you?" set
us up to look good. Indeed most (if not all) of our uttered untruths
set us up to look good. By answering untruthfully, I set myself up to
look good by masquerading as someone who's OK. There's a pull to being
someone who's seen as being OK. We've made it OK to lie in response to
that pull. But the way we're then seen, comes at a terrible cost.
There's one thing, next to which lying in response to that pull, pales:
being someone who tells the truth, no matter what it is, no matter what
it looks like, because it's the truth. That's rare. To do so, is
to
take a stand.
More than that, in
the world
as we know it, there's scant agreement for this sort of thing. To do so
is to look at the gap between what we say as true which isn't really
100% true (like saying "Fine" or "OK" or "Well" in response to "How are
you?" especially when both I and my day aren't going well at all).
There's a choice to make between being Mr
Wonderful
who's always having a great day (ie who always says he's
having a great day) and being someone who tells the truth
unflinchingly
ie someone who doesn't stand for the accepted, glossed-over gap between
what we say, and what's actually true.
What all this comes down to, is choosing what it's worth being known
for: always having
a wonderful day
euphemistically, or always telling the truth
unflinchingly.
It's the choice between being inauthentic in order to be popular ...
or ... telling the truth with integrity, no matter
how steep it is to do, no matter how unpopular it may make
you. But listen:
here's the secret,
here are the keys to the kingdom: you don't tell the truth
in order to be popular: you tell the truth in order to tell the
truth.
