Truth be told...

I got up one Saturday feeling very fresh and creative, wanting to do something really productive that day. The last thing I wanted to do was to laze around talking on the phone or watching TV. As though the Satan read my mind, my cell phone was busy ringing at regular intervals the entire day and since I was doing what I was doing and enjoying it, I let the phone ring each time, listening to the “hey what’s up?” voice messages once in a while. At the end of the day all that I could think of was what reason I should give to those people for not taking their calls so as not to sound rude or make them feel unimportant. Not knowing what to say precisely, I decided to call them later during the week when they would have forgotten the fact that I didn’t take their calls.

The next week went by and something or the other kept me from calling them and a bunch of them called back that weekend…now this was a tricky situation. This not only made me liable for an explanation of the previous week’s “incident”, but added more pressure since they had initiated the call this time also. I attended the calls of those who I thought were easier to handle, but that didn’t give me enough confidence to call the “tough guys”.

Why do we make life this complicated? Who was the first person who declared that being told the truth was hurting? Why is it not socially acceptable to call a person and say that you didn’t take his/her call since you didn’t feel like it? What’s with diplomacy?

How often do we say exactly what we think?

Almost all the stress and depression we suffer from can be attributed to fear of not being accepted by the society. That wouldn’t be half as bad if we at least told the truth to one another, which seldom happens. You have a haircut, some people compliment your on your new look others decide not to comment. You go out of the way to ask one of them how it looks and he says it’s good. Now, you don’t believe ANY of them. At this point, it’s not that tough for you to accept the fact that some of them dislike it, but what bothers you more is that you are not sure what each one thinks about it (as though it matters).

The most misleading thing about not being told the truth is that we interpret the person’s hints/reactions based on what we would mean to convey if we reacted the exact same way. Given that each of us is very different in how we emote, this can be very inaccurate. Based on this derived “fact” we make other choices and decisions, which are also bound to fail since our initial assumption was wrong.

Children are an exception to this behavior. They do lie of course, not with the intention of making you feel good, but usually to guise their actions and escape punishment. They are brutally frank if they have opinions and are not shy to say that the food tastes bad when they are dining at somebody else’s place. When the truth is revealed by the kids, the adults usually don’t take it to heart since they know that the kids haven’t yet been “trained”. Why do we not handle the truth with the same attitude irrespective of who delivers it? The age limit for this acceptance varies from one society to another. In some societies, if you are 12 and still “telling the truth”, it’s a clear indication of bad parenting, in some others, 10 years is all they give you to speak up. Until then life IS paradise – no stress, no worries, no misunderstandings and no gossips!!

When I was 5, my class teacher was taking attendance and since she had made some mistake, wanted an eraser. Since I was sitting rather close to where she was, she asked me if I had one. Given that I did not want to give it to her, if I had reacted like an adult, my answer would have been “No ma’am, I don’t have one” and I would have taken all the efforts to hide my eraser away so that she doesn’t accuse me of lying. Since I was a child and was still legally allowed to tell the truth, my answer was “I gave you my eraser the last time you had asked for it, and you lost it. So, I would not like to give it to you this time”. She just asked me to apologize for what I had just said. The flip side of that being, at some level, I was discouraged to tell the truth in such situations. By the way, I was fully trained before my teens.

It takes a lot of effort to make up a lie and to maintain it. It also takes at least the same level of effort to correctly interpret another person’s lies. And, lying is so much easier than hinting. The toughest part is to make sure that your casual comments don’t get misinterpreted as hints…whoa! That’s a lot of unnecessary stuff to learn throughout your life and very few people really master this “art of communication” (which is what the adults like to call that). Why don’t we get used to the Truth?! Why don’t we just take what people say at face value and act on it based on how much that person’s opinions mean to us? Wouldn’t it be fantastic live with a child’s heart and an adult’s brain?

Think about it…