Rigorous Honesty

Life is all about progress … Life is just far too short to waste a minute of it. Marie Rayner

What do you do with your trash? Unless you are a hoarder, you face it, bag it, toss it, then forget it.

That seems like a no-brainer, and yet it is hard to toss away those experiences of life that have caused us pain and grief. We are haunted by our negative experiences, and yet we don’t have to be afraid of them; we don’t need to be ashamed of them.

They are part of the fabric of our lives, but they aren’t the sum total of who we are. They add to us shape, color, and texture, but we don’t have to be weighed down by them.

While painful experiences are regrettable, we can become stronger for them. It is often the awful things that happen that can inspire us to work harder or to work smarter to overcome them.

I believe God would have us be happy, joyous, and free, and since we cannot deny what we have done or what has been done to us, we need to learn how to move past those events so that we don’t get stuck there. There is no easy solution, but there is hope.

As I mentioned last week, the key is in a little thing called “rigorous honesty.”

Too much of what we do in life is done on auto-pilot. We don’t think things through. Paraphrasing Julius Caesar, we look in the rearview mirror and say, “Veni, Vedi, Vudu” (I came, I saw, I did what!?).

Leaving aside the matter of the world’s few true psychopaths and sociopaths, most of us go through life knowing right and wrong. Many of the ills we visit on others are done primarily out of ignorance or carelessness, but sometimes there’s malice.

When we take advantage of someone, we generally know it, even if we try to rationalize away our actions (I shouldn’t have hit her, but she made me angry; or I thought when she loaned me money that she meant it to be a gift; etc.)

What we’re doing is sanitizing matters and protecting our ego. That’s no good. Even though it is the other person who is wounded by our words and deeds, we are also wounded, for wounds always cut in both directions.

Mature people know how to make amends – to make things right. We do that by facing what we have done, doing what we can to fix things, then handing it over to God, our heavenly trash compactor. We aren’t responsible for what others have done, but for what we can do ourselves.

That’s an important distinction. It is our job to take care of our side of the street because that is the only way we can attain true peace of mind.

Too often we want to wait for the other person to make the first move, or we want to see evidence that they are going to change, but that presumes we are completely innocent, and we generally aren’t.

Even when we do something good, it can have consequences we didn’t anticipate, but which hurt, and so we need to be ready to accept responsibility for making things right, not because we are at fault, but because a human being who is mature accepts responsibility and faces issues head on, and takes care of them, and does what is necessary to prevent misunderstandings or problems in the future.

In the song Shame, Fernando Ortega sings, “I am small and self-conscious / every mirror reflects this grain / Judge my essence by my kinships / remember me … not my shame.”

Each of us is human; we know there will be misunderstandings and acts that estrange us from one another. What prevents us from moving forward, however, is our shame; our inability to acknowledge our faults, to make lasting corrections, and to move on.

If a person wants to be happy, joyous, and free, he/she need only deal with their trash: Face it, Bag it, Toss it, and then Forget about it. If a ghostly memory rises up to haunt you, tell it, “Be gone, for I’ve given you to God.” Then let go of it, for now it is God’s problem in this, our world. Go in Peace.