I am indebted to Mark "Rambo" Dicrosta who inspired this conversation.
We the people (yes, we the people) will make a promise /
give our word, then routinely not keep our promise / break our word.
Even more than that, we'll not give a second thought to the impact
breaking our word has on our lives, on others, on
Life itself.
For the most part, we have it that keeping our word
doesn't matter,
that it's but one of many options, that it's not the bastion of
workability
it really is, that if I say I'll do something, it's only capriciously
true.
In my earliest inquiries into
who I am as word
(yes,
"who I am as word"
not "who I am as my word") I had it that I could define
integrity as "keeping my word". That's actually not a bad start ...
until I
began
noticing its shortcomings. For example, let's say I give my word I'll
meet you at 3:45pm, and a cyclone takes out the road to our meeting
place. I can't ie don't keep my word to meet you. Do I still have
integrity? Well ... no, not if integrity is keeping my word.
Clearly it's crazy to allow a cyclone to be the arbitrator of my
integrity. But listen: a cyclone preventing me keeping my word isn't
the problem. The problem is when integrity is defined only as keeping
my word which can therefore be arbitrated by a cyclone, a definition
which won't hold
water
(no pun intended).
If there's something essential I got from that inquiry, it's that
keeping my word is certainly a component of integrity. Yet in and of
itself, it's neither the main component nor is it a
powerful component. The most powerful component of
integrity focuses less on keeping my word, and more on
"honoring my
word".
With all that said, my opening
observation
that "we the people (yes, we the people) will make a promise / give our
word, and then routinely not keep our promise / break our word" is
really an indictment of the state of affairs prior to
being in the inquiry that differentiates between integrity as keeping
my word and
honoring my word.
It addresses that certain state of affairs when we're unaware of (or
choose to ignore) the impact of breaking our word on our lives, and on
our relationships with others (and hence on others directly), and the
impact of trivializing word, of diminishing its impact on the quality
of
Life itself.
"I'll call you" he said, "Let's get together for coffee.". We've all
heard that before - or at least something quite similar to it. In
saying it, he was giving me his word he'll call. And when he didn't
call, I felt it. You've felt it. We've all felt it. At worst it's a
sense of being lied to. At best it's the sense of disappointment. When
you give me your word and you break it (or you don't
honor
it) I feel let down, disappointed, even taken for granted, used,
cheated, and cheapened.
This is an extremely wide-spread, particularly malignant malaise. No
country is immune to the debilitating effects of its contagion, and yet
the only effective vaccine available is one you develop for yourself
and inoculate yourself with. I've noticed that its pre-eminent symptom
is the disappointment of the word breakers. Interimly the
disappointment is experienced by those with whom the word breakers
break their word without
honoring their word.
Ultimately the disappointment is experienced by the word breakers
themselves, given that
without integrity, nothing
works.
The collective cost to everyone of breaking our word without
honoring our word
is
workability
across the board in life. It's a
relentlessly
severe, steep cost for which we all pay, not just the word breakers.
