Nov
Truth or Not
I knew a woman who wanted everything to be her way. She acted as if she thought she always knew better than everyone else. People knew otherwise. The woman had her idea of how things should be, and tried to make them fit that mold. Were anyone to disagree with her, she took offense.
The woman insisted that she valued the truth. “I want you to tell me the truth,” she would say. The problem was that she became indignant if the truth did not agree with what she wanted to hear. She was the kind of person who would rather hear a nice lie than an unpleasant truth.
There is justice in the world,. The woman tried to prove that she was a better mother and all around better person than everyone around her. She believed that her family would stick together out of love for her. She also felt that the extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins would remain close. In fact, the time came when her husband moved 80 miles away from her, her eldest son had left and stayed out of touch and the extended family was scattered to the winds. The woman made many excuses why things happened as they did, but nobody believed them.
The cause of her problems was that she was working from lies rather than facts. She had so insisted on hearing what she wanted to hear that she never heard what she needed to hear. In the course of it, she alienated people and drove her family away. I wonder how much of that could have been avoided had she listened to the facts.
Would you rather hear a nice lie or an unpleasant truth?
A lie is a falsehood, and unreality. You cannot do anything with it because it does not exist. You can do something with a fact, even if it is unpleasant. You can change things or change yourself accordingly when you deal in facts. If you deal in lies, you let the facts deal with you. Worse, the lies blind you to the facts, so that you are often caught by surprise.
It is better to hear an unpleasant truth than a nice lie. The truth lets you deal with facts. The lie lets facts deal with you behind your back.
