Lie to me ~ but don’t lie to yourself

So often we live our lives unaware from one day to the next. We go through the motions, what I call ‘existing,’ living a life without involvement, without passion. We are all guilty of it at different points in our lives, even at different points of our days.

The older I get, the more I value honesty. While important, I’m not even talking so much about honesty with each other, but always honesty with ourselves. Ever notice how easy it is to lie to ourselves, and how easy it is to ‘exist’ in our own world because we don’t want to face the truth?

One of nice things about having a granddaughter is that now I am much more relaxed and much wiser than I was when I was raising my own daughters. I take the time, I gently share truths with her, and the great thing is that she listens! When I asked her recently how she felt about something unkind that a friend had done, she said, “I don’t care, it doesn’t bother me.”

Truth is, it DID bother her. So we talked about how different things would be for her if she acknowledged, if only to herself, that it really had hurt, and then her responses and her decisions would be different. She HEARD me, and it made a big difference.

I had a long talk yesterday with a friend who was devastated by the apparent betrayal of a co-worker. When I focused her on the TRUTH of the situation, she realized that it was NOT a betrayal, and that SHE had the upper hand in the situation, and what had been a crisis was now a healing situation.

We can tell ourselves all kinds of things, but when we tell ourselves the TRUTH, our lives change. We live in reality, not in escapism because we haven’t wanted to face the actuality of what is under our nose.

I recently met with a friend that told me that everything was terrific with his job. I knew it wasn’t. When we talked about his TRUTH, he could focus on what he needed to deal with to help him so he didn’t keep existing in the lie.

I shared my story of my daughter Betsy’s Life Day. In my world of ‘just existing,’ I could have terminated the pregnancy and no one would have been the wiser. But MY TRUTH was that that would have forever changed the course of my life, and whatever decision I made, I needed to make it TRUTHFULLY.

There is a fine line between keeping a positive attitude and living in TRUTH. We need to stay positive. We need to put one foot in front of the other and not look back. But we need to put that foot on the path of personal honesty so that we can live our lives to the fullest. I believe that is possible only if we are honest with ourselves.

Is there a lie in your life that you need to face? It is no one else’s business but yours, but it IS YOUR BUSINESS. Don’t lie to YOU.