The Importance of Honesty
posted February 7, 2008 - 7:56pm
The Importance of Honesty
Honesty is something I feel often gets overlooked, but it’s a lesson that probably comes to us all, eventually. For me, honesty is a vital link in the ecosystem of life, on which everything either directly or indirectly depends. It can seem unimportant, but if you try to remove it, the entire system falls apart.
It can be a very complex issue, however, because there are degrees of both honesty and dishonesty, and it’s not always as simple as asserting that you should always tell the truth - there are plenty of situations where the truth is better withheld.
By raising a discussion of this subject I am of course not talking about the aspects of honesty covered by the concept of saving peoples’ feelings. I’m talking about delivering false truths and/or withholding true truths for one’s own benefit, from another who would otherwise benefit if the truth were not withheld from them.
Pattern of Lying
Most things in life follow some sort of pattern, and it’s not always obvious in the early stages of anything just what that pattern might be. It is a person less experienced with life who has not yet learned the value of honesty, and it is an unfortunate thing indeed that the only way this lesson can be learned is through experiencing the pattern that unfolds with lies. Of course, the pattern is quite simple, but nothing is learned quite as easily as direct experience.
The pattern is: you lie, and are either discovered immediately or discovered at a later stage. The sooner a lie is uncovered the lesser the damage, simply because a lie discovered is a lie you are no longer telling, but a lie that lives day after day is a lie you tell every day, if not indeed every moment.
The Damage
Something else people generally fail to realise is that the negative effects of a lie don’t just affect the person to whom the lie is being told. We are all very good at filtering things from our minds, but none of us are as good as we believe we are, as it is generally only when something leaves our attention that we notice it was there in the first place.
A truth withheld becomes like a stone you must carry with you until the truth is told. At first it doesn’t weigh much at all, which is why it seems very much easier to tell the lie than the truth. But any weight becomes heavier depending on how far you have to carry it. Lies often also need smaller lies to be told to ‘lend weight‘ to the original lie - a fitting choice of phrase, because of course it does exactly that.
The Release
Lies always get found out.
When the time comes that you either put them down or they are toppled from your grasp, you will feel the most tremendous release. Unfortunately, such weighty lies always land on the person to whom they were told, and it will hurt. But, if you drop it on them tomorrow it will hurt more than it would today. Sure, it would have been easier before, and now it feels too late, but just as every passing moment is another lie, if you turn things around now then every moment becomes a truth.
Author: davidstone78
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