Truth, Lies and Real Life

Truth, Lies and Real Life

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist, lecturer, and poet (1803-1882)

Apart from a few notable twists of truth in my childhood, to avoid punishment (deserved) for my misdeeds (my lies never succeeded in fooling my parents), I have always been a great supporter of telling the truth.
That has had me facing trouble when it was revealed (some said I should have kept quiet). However, trouble inevitably follows lies as a bad smell follows a skunk. Telling the truth allowed me to work my way through unpleasant consequences, where necessary, to find clear sailing beyond. The consequences were of shorter duration, requiring less subterfuge, when I was able to face them and work through them.
That sometimes had its own downside. People I worked with, or for, found themselves having to cope with someone who told everything "as it is." I avoided exaggeration and meanness, but my truth made them uncomfortable. The reason is that my truth often brought to light their own misdeeds or avoidance of fulfilling their own responsibilities.
Sometimes that meant that workmates avoided me for some period of time. Sometimes it caused me to have to look for a new job. They covered their failures and inadequacies and expected me to do the same with my own. To them, pretending was preferable to bringing the cold hard truth to light and having to face others who were upset by it.
It avoided forcing them to change.
We have this nebulous term "white lies." One dictionary I consulted described the meaning of this term as "an unimportant lie (especially one told to be tactful or polite)." I question the value of the "unimportant lie."
A standard joke of comedians tells of the husband who, when asked by his wife if the dress she has just put on is too tight or looks good and will make her look fine at an event they are about to attend, replies (when he fears she might burst a seam) "Of course dear, you look great, as always." This, we are told, is an acceptable white lie.
Let’s lay this one out bare. The woman knows the dress is too tight or she would not have asked her husband for an opinion. The husband knows the dress is too tight but doesn’t want to make his wife feel bad. Problem solved, for the moment. Then the couple attends the event where every women who sees the wife can see she obviously is wearing a dress that is too tight--or simply that she has gained weight she doesn’t want to admit to.
That situation, we are asked to ignore, to claim that no one at the event will notice the too-tight dress. I submit that every woman at the evident would notice, and many men as well. Moreover, the penalty she will suffer for her social faux pas will be much greater than if she had simply faced the truth (or been told the truth by her husband) and changed to another garment before leaving home.
No one at an event wants to tell a woman that her cosmetics are smeared, as that might embarrass her. So she moves about advertising her messy face to everyone until she later sees herself in a mirror in the ladies’ room. Again, the embarrassment she feels when she realizes that so many others have seen her with messy makeup is far greater than what she would feel if someone had told her sooner.
By the same token, a man might emerge from a public washroom/restroom with his shirt tucked inside his boxers at the back and the waistband of the boxers advertised to the world until the next time he visits the washroom. Is a feeling of great shame in private any less significant than a slight embarrassment when something is revealed in public?
White lies and slight perversions of the truth to help someone avoid embarrassment "to be tactful or polite" always come out. The consequences are always worse later than they would have been at the time.
A white lie is simply a way to delay a worse consequence.
What is the attraction of a lie? Often a lie will produce exactly the results in a person that the person wants to have.
Lies are beautiful, in the short term.
An example that keeps thumping in my brain is the concept of the character of God. Every religion has a God (some, like Buddhism, are technically philosophies of life). Every religion admits that we have no way of knowing anything about God. Yet there are people in every religion who will happily tell you all manner of warm and comforting things they believe about God. Where did these things originate? In lies. Well meaning lies, I admit. Tell them what they want to hear.
Oddly, most religions grant a male gender to their God, yet the characteristics given by those with ready answers about their God almost inevitably fit better someone of female gender, a mother. Why? Those who do not feel personally secure want to feel that their God cares for them the way a mother would.
For some, it works. For a while.
Getting back to our original quotation by Emerson, I question just how beautiful most people find truth. Truth in nature, for sure. As the saying goes, truth is beauty and beauty truth. Even the truth of a natural disaster, when viewed after the fact and from a distance, can be seen as beautiful, in a way.
If we judged the truth of Emerson’s statement about truth and lies based on our own culture, we would have to say that we immerse ourselves in lies. Almost nothing we see on television or on the stage is true, the exception being documentaries (though some of them have political or social agendas with carefully edited "facts"). Virtually everything in every commercial or print advertising is a perversion of the truth (massaging truth to make it look better, making us want what we mostly don’t need).
We live in houses that convey a certain social status we may not have in reality, wear clothes that tell strangers we are something we may not be, drive cars or trucks to make others believe we can actually afford them.
Put simply, lies are more attractive than the truth. There are those among us who want to believe our lies so much that they actually come to believe them. Where is the truth? We expect others, even strangers, to "have faith" that the message we are trying to convey is the truth.
The hidden request is to "trust me."
No matter how many times we say a lie, it is still a lie. But we can believe the lie. That’s life. But is it really better than the truth?

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want their children to be able to cope, without fear and lies, with the world they will one day enter as adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

What Kind Of World Do We Have Really?

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession to their character.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, American philosopher and poet (1803-1882)

Think about it. That person who is so negative about the world, isn't he also a pessimist about his own future and his place in the world?

The loving mother who dotes on her children also looks on the world as a loving place, with bad guys being the exceptions not the rule.

The happy person sees happy people around him and finds happy situations even when reading world news.

The violent person can cite not just violent experiences from his own family while growing up, he can show you violence all around his community and the world.

A trusting person believes that the world operates on trust, while untrustworthy people are few.

Is your opinion of the world a confession of your character, as Emerson claimed? While the two are related directly, I believe that the relationship goes the opposite way to what Emerson stated. We see in the world people like ourselves. Those who are not like us seem to be the exceptions. When we don't see people like ourselves in our immediate world, we look for them in other places. Sometimes that means a move, a change of job or a change of partner.

Even in the face of apparently overwhelming evidence to the contrary, people will believe about the world what they want to believe. An optimistic person will see the world as a positive place. Nothing will console a negative person about what a hell-on-earth we live in and how no one should bring up a child in the present conditions.

Is the world really a great place with enormous possibilities? Or is hell something we live through each day of our lives?

It depends on what kind of person you are.

If you don't care for the world as it is, change your attitude toward yourself and those around you. You world will gradually become a marvelous place.

You don't have to take Emerson's word for it. Think about what you think of the world in general and about what you think of your own life.

It's true that life is what we make of it. It's also true that your world is what you make of it.

Live the life you want your life to be. The world around you will follow your example.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children with positive attitudes toward themselves and their world and need the tools to make it happen.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Your Future: Eternal What?

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

The days say nothing. Have you noticed how quickly your days pass than they did years ago?

Days, months and years passing quicker is a common perception of people as they get older. These packets of time seem to speed up with each passing decade. Then they are gone, having said nothing.

Oh, we have memories. Maybe pictures. But the pictures serve to mark the passage of time as much as they do to arouse memories.

Not everyone laments the passage of time. Not everyone lets their days pass silently, taking with them the gifts each brought and offered with so little fanfare. Those who made the most of their days look back at them not with regret but with pride.

More importantly, those who look back at days past with pride dwell only lightly on their past because they look forward to their future with vigour. Their future looks exciting because they have built their past up to it with activity that caused them to grow. To them, the future is something to look forward to with anticipation, each day an adventure to be launched with the rising sun.

If this seems poetic to you, consider how productive your past has been, how worthy of your time your investments in the components of your life. If you fear the passage of time in your life, maybe you need to build more into your future.

That doesn't mean more excitement, more daring, more places to visit, more travel, more stuff, more of the things that wear away at your time on earth. It means building something of value to show that you were here. To show others, when you're gone, that you're worth remembering.

To leave that kind of legacy, you need to do things that matter to other people, not just to yourself. If everything you do is for your own benefit, no one will have any reason to remember you after you are gone. If what you do involves and helps others, no matter how small each effort may be, then you will leave a lasting memory.

When you leave this earth, you will not be here to promote yourself. Only the others who are left can do that. If you want to be remembered fondly and with respect, you must act in ways that will benefit those who will succeed you on this planet.

OK, so maybe you're busy now, reading stuff on the internet. But you can begin tomorrow.
Tomorrow--your whole future--should be looked upon with a little apprehension. If you don't stretch yourself beyond what you feel comfortable with, you can never grow. If you don't grow, you will retreat with age. The longer you retreat, you more your spirit as well as your body will atrophy.

Rejoice in the bit of fear that the future holds because only by conquering that fear will you grow to become more than you are today. As you overcome that fear, you become greater than you are. And by helping others who will have greater capacity to do more that is worth remembering.

There is little point in eternal life if you didn't make much use of the one you had here. Eternal boredom offers little to look forward to.

Launch your future when the sun launches itself tomorrow morning. The sun will keep going in circles. You don't have to. You have a future to build. You have to build toward eternity.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to help people build a better future rather than letting the present decay with age.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The Road To Success Leads Through Failure

Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the toughest lessons to learn, especially for those who live in the western world, is that our bodies were designed to work hard, to struggle, to overcome. This does not set well with people who were raised on the belief that the easy life was ahead, that leisure was the way of the future. We were designed to overcome, but it isn't necessary that we overcome difficulties that we could easily have avoided.

Ease and leisure were never the way of the future, except in the minds of those whose intention was to profit from designing and producing products to sell to us using the hook that our lives will be easier. Did dishwashers, computers or televisions make our lives better, considering all of the consequences that resulted from their use?

Technology gives us the opportunity to learn more, to grow, to expand who we are. But it comes at a cost. In some cases, the cost has been obesity, broken marriages, families with two working parents who still can't make ends meet and kids who play video games at home because their parents feel it's too dangerous for them to be alone on the streets. True, those are not immediate consequences, but downstream results of life changes that resulted from using these "essential" technologies.

Emerson's point is that it's all right to make mistakes, to experiment and fail, because life is about experimenting. That means that more learning comes from failure than from success. We can accept one change without buying into a series of life changes that sometimes result from it.
Success brings an end to growth for many people, whereas each failure gives an opportunity to rebuild ourselves better than ever before. Setbacks are opportunities for those who know how to rebuild themselves. These are not skills that are widely taught in schools.

What we must be cautious about is experimenting with things that could have tragic consequences. Usually that requires us to investigate the consequences that have resulted from other people doing something we anticipate doing ourselves. If they have caused too much grief, the risk must be assessed before launching into the new venture.

An example would be people who experiment with taking drugs. In most cases, people who begin taking illegal drugs have been encouraged to do so by others who want company (or sales). Often the first experiments are free offerings. Tobacco companies have done this outside of schoolyards--mostly recently in some African countries--giving free cigarettes to children as young as six years. Kids only a couple of years older than that have been offered free street drugs. Kids don't know the downside of taking street drugs.

These children and even adolescents and adults who try street drugs have usually not been advised about how using them has destroyed the lives and the futures of many people who used the same drugs before them. Very few people will experiment with a drug if they have met someone whose life and family have been destroyed by drug use.

Many people would say that "Common sense should prevail." It should. However, common sense is not innate to us at birth. All common sense (if there be any such thing) is taught commonly, to all people, usually in childhood. People don't use common sense if they have not been taught how to apply themselves to a decision about experimenting with something new.

At the rate we can see from newspapers and lists such as the Darwin Awards that people have not used common sense, we must conclude that it has not been taught to every child. Walk through supermarket aisles and you might believe that almost none of the people you see have been taught the common sense rules of sharing space with others.

Common sense is a series of life skills that should be included in the curriculum of every school district. Every one of those skills is more important and more useful than any given bit of learning in chemistry, mathematics or language. Every one is usable by every person who knows it.

Experiment with life, yes, but do so with some degree of caution and research so that tragedy is not a certainty for the future.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make human needs a necessary part of learning for every child.
Learn more at http://billallin.com