YOU SHOULD ALWAYS BE HONEST

I have always found it difficult to lie. This is not through any pious “George Washington and the fruit tree”, “holier than thou” mindset, it’s just that my memory can be so vague when it comes to obfuscation that I’m better off telling the truth. It’s far safer, because I have the sort of memory that absorbs facts and figures quite easily, and trying to remember something that is the complete opposite of a fact tends to send it into a meltdown of confusion, and I end up trying to remember which lie I am supposed to recollect which tends to give the game away.

Almost immediately the prospect of having to tell a lie finds me trying to compute the outcomes, and who might talk to whom about what, and who might know what the truth is already and catch me out in the lie, and it’s all basically far too complicated and an absolute minefield that is best left well alone.

They used to ask me to lie all the time when I was doing one of the jobs I used to do. These were mostly “white lies” (a hideous concept if you ask me) were supposed too help smooth the workflow in meetings by being “economical with the truth” about what stage certain projects were really at, or claiming that more time might be needed.

I remember emerging from one short pre-meeting meeting feeling very affronted: “They’re asking me to lie for them and I told them I can’t (i.e. won’t) do that…”

Ain’t that the truth…?

Perhaps this aversion to lying comes from when I was growing up and I occasionally saw the miserable fallout of people caught out in a lie, but I think that it’s far, far less noble than that. I just know that I’d rather not be caught telling one, perhaps because that I know that I am very likely to have a “tell”, that little nervous tick that lets the world know when I’m bluffing. I’m sure that I must have. These days I’m such a mass of nervous ticks, twitches, eye rolls and gestures that it would be more surprising if I didn’t have one I suppose. I’m sure anyone playing me at cards would immediately know whether I was bluffing or not from the sudden calm that drifted across the table towards them, not that I play cards, of course. I’m far, far too scared of losing, because they say you should never gamble more than you can afford to lose and I’ve always felt so insecure that I’m terrified of losing anything.

So, if I’m being completely honest, which is, after all, what I’m talking about this morning, I don’t know whether or not I do have a “tell” and I doubt that I’m ever likely to find out.

They say that honesty is the best policy, but of course it isn’t. If we were all truly honest with each other all of the time, we’d all spend most of our lives totally offended. Take for example the situation I have with one particular group of people I know, a particularly lovely bunch who often try to include me in their activities despite the fact that I seldom make the effort to turn up. There are many, many issues that come into play, not all of them my own, whenever I am asked to come along to, for example a birthday event, or a dinner party, or when I’m offered a free gift of a night out. All of these lovely gestures have to be balanced against factors of reluctance and history that crop up that make it so that we would prefer not to go. It’s not their fault, and nothing they’ve done is a factor in this, but the weight of past history, or decisions made and designed to be stuck to, can weigh rather heavily against the pleasant options of the now, but these things are difficult to explain. How do you tell someone that it’s not them, but you’d prefer not to attend something in case you run into one of your own personal ancient landmines, despite the fact that for the rest of the world an awful lot of water has flowed under a hell of a lot of bridges? Is it just better to lie and say we’ve got something else on, that you’ve got a migraine, or that you’re away that weekend?

I have actually been known to book a weekend away rather than have to attend certain functions, but I digress. Still, it’s better than lying, isn’t it…?

But there are times when the truth is best left untold, when telling the gospel truth will cause far more pain than a little “white lie” I suppose, although my preference is always (believe it or not) to go for the “say nothing” approach in such circumstances rather than to be caught out in a lie later. But then, is a “lie of omission” any better than an out-and-out, in-your-face, brazen utter and actual lie?

“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”

Mind you, I have been known to be a bit of a fantasist. I do play tiny little personal games with people by perhaps saying something totally outrageous that I don’t think that I really believe, just to see what sort of reaction I get, although perhaps that is simply because I’m more interested in whether or not they actually believe me to be the kind of person who would actually believe such a thing.

Then again, my own notions of what I believe and don’t believe, and what opinions I hold on all sorts of things can change with the wind these days. Some days I will be utterly emphatic about supporting one point of view, only to be convinced by the opposite one, sometimes within the space of very same sentence, and if you sometimes think that it’s complicated keeping up with what I might think about any one thing at any one time, believe me (if you dare), it’s far more complicated actually being me…

But I may very well be lying about that, and that’s the truth.

Believe me…

(Originally written February 7th, 2012 but not published)