Can we ever be truly honest with anyone besides ourselves? Can we ever be truly honest with ourselves? A friend recently got into some trouble with her boyfriend because of dishonesty, so its been something I’ve been thinking about a bunch again lately. It is a recurring theme for me, present as subtext in a lot of my other ponderings, and one we all could do well to examine in our own lives.
Its something I think about as a parent, especially now with a kid who can read just about anything. I think about truth in the small details, and in the big stuff as I try to do my best in my relationships with my children, my husband, my family, my friends, and even the community in a larger sense. When the kids were quite little, we let them watch as the chickens were killed, gutted and cleaned. When my daughter wants to know the definition of words like “ejaculate” and “microcosm”, we look them up together. When she wants to know about time travel and how to make a time machine, I borrow some library books about Einstein and get her started. sharing everything i’ve learned up to this point. I hope it gives her advantages in her own life to have as much honest information as possible. . When she’s older and wants to know about sex, drugs and rock n roll, i’ll most likely give her all of the truth as I see it (or remember it!) .
I usually give my kids the straight story, even when I know they probably can’t quite comprehend it yet. I’m sure I do this because I can remember being deceived often as a kid. Sometimes it was with good intentions, with the assumption that things were “over my head”, sometimes with small things- as simple as my grandma telling me the ducklings she was serving for sunday dinner were “cornish hens”. Overhearing the truth from the other room was devastating, especially after I’d spent countless hours over the summer hand feeding families of fuzzy baby mallard quacklings at the lake. For ten years as a young adult I was a vegetarian, and to this day I still can’t eat a duck. I want my children to have the advantage of truth, of many truths, and I want for them to surpass my knowledge in their own quests for truthful information, and so I share with them what I know to be true of the universe. I never really thought about it as being an unusual way to treat and interact with kids, until a friend pointed out during a play group how “funny “ it was the way I explained something about the structural components of the house to her son. “what do you mean?“ I asked her to clarify. “well, you’re explaining things to him as if he was an adult” . I never had considered that you would treat or speak to children differently than you would adults! She wasn’t talking about vocabulary, she meant that she was surprised that i took the time to carefully explain something he was asking a question about. I had never thought much about how other people talked to their kids, or that a parent could feel that their children somehow deserved less of an explanation just because they’re “just a kid” , be it about studs in the wall or their thoughts on god. I started paying more attention.
What i’ve been noticing is that many people lie. They lie a lot. They lie habitually about stupid little stuff, and they lie about big stuff, they lie to their kids, friends, family, spouses, partners, bosses, employees, people at the checkout line who they don’t actually even know. It becomes part of their nature, and maybe it makes it easier for them not to do their best. Maybe whats worst is that they lie to themselves. If you start paying attention, you’ll discover how refreshing it is when you meet someone who is habitually honest.
Stubborn honesty isn’t really a choice for me. My brain most days overflows with rambling thoughts (it’s probably some sort of ADD):persistent worries, latent desires, project ideas, internal shopping and to-do lists, nostalgic musings, calm introspection and the occasional flash of enlightenment. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have any room in there for deception. I realized somewhere around middle school age that being truthful all of the time saves you a lot of trouble trying to keep your story straight. It took a bit longer (maybe until my mid-twenties) to realize that telling the truth doesn’t make you especially popular. And I’m still learning that many of us aren’t comfortable with the truth. So many of us, women in particular, have a desire to be people-pleasers, so much so that dishonesty often creeps in around the edges, disguised as some fuzzy white suggestion of appeasement. It’s often harder to tell the truth like you see it. You know before you begin that it wont be well received. Sometimes its best to say nothing. I am still learning that too. An art teacher asks 100 people to draw the same still life, and she’ll get 100 very different perspectives on the same reality, as you will with the “truth” of any given situation.
I often have the sad sensation that just in my being straightforward and honest, expressing my ideas, the person I’m conversing with puts up a wall, determining that my honesty is somehow a personal judgement of them. I admit that I am critical and judgemental, but often my meaning is a comment of a wider view, of things I wish were different in the world- not an individualized judgement – it’s not usually a personal judgement unless someone is just completely unreasonable or abusive or a total twit. I suppose from someone else’s perspective it might seem that I’m the one who is unreasonable, and I have to learn to brush it off as a good indicator that someone probably isn’t very educated. I do my best to inform and keep things friendly, try to express what i know to be true in a clear straightforward way, but often i’m left feeling shut out. I try to keep to the facts as much as I can but maybe people don’t want to know the facts. Stepping out of the deluded shadows into the sunny light of truth can be a challenge. I need to become bolder and more confident. I’m working on it.
Human love is tricky when it comes to honesty. Love is expansive and inclusive, yet we humans want to own it , want to keep squeeze it into some container we can lock up. We want it to be unique, and unparalleled. I’m not convinced that Love is actually is patient and kind. I think it can be bitter and restless, and if it isn’t acted upon in an honest , patient and kind way- it can cause a great amount of suffering. I know this when I hear about the pain and despair that is caused by deception. For me, its clear that love cannot be contained, it grows and moves and changes. I’ve loved many humans besides my husband, in many different ways, and all of those loves were unique. I wouldn’t change them if I could go back and do it over again, I might change my actions, but not the love; not the truth. None of these loves lessens the other loves, they don’t diminish in any way the love of my man, whose children I have chosen to bring onto this earth. If anything, the past gave me much that I still carry around with me, much that affects my current interactions as I try to do the best I can. One thing I know it true is that our inner emotional life, though it may seem to each one of us to be most significant, it is really much less important than our actions and through them what we manifest around us. It’s these that are of much greater consequence.
Thoughts From an Island 