No Lie!

I Refuse to Tell a Lie

“It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.”

                                  H. L. Mencken

         When I was four, and my sister, Jerrie, was eight, Alice in Wonderland was released by Disney for the first time.  Mother was going to take us to see it in the afternoon and we were quite excited.  Jerrie and I were trying to occupy ourselves until time for the movie; she broke a thermometer so that we could play with the mercury inside—watch it form little balls and bounce around the floor.  When Mother found the broken thermometer, she lectured us on the ills of playing with mercury, and demanded to know which of us broke it.  We both stared at her, tight-lipped.  When neither of us would tell her the truth, she announced, “We will not go to the movie until I know who broke this thermometer.”  I was mortified.  I wanted more than anything to see Alice, but Jerrie wouldn’t budge.  The day wore on and time weighed heavily on me.  If Jerrie didn’t fess-up, I knew that Mother would not change her mind.  Finally, I went to Mother and told her I had broken the thermometer.  She gave me a lecture on the importance of telling the truth and said how proud she was of me for my courage.  We went to see the movie.  Jerrie never broke.  Neither did I.

         Everybody lies.  In fact, research studies show that children begin lying to protect themselves by three years of age and by five, they are consummate liars.  By adulthood, we lie for all kinds of reasons—to impress people, to cover our stupidity, to get out of things we don’t want to do.  We want to control how people see us and how we see ourselves.  One study found that sixty percent of adults lied at least once in a ten-minute conversation, with 2.92 lies per ten-minutes being average. 

         Of course, there are lies told for the right reasons—we don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings, to tell the truth would harm someone else, etc.  But most of the time, we lie because we think the truth would hurt us.  We lie about our motivations, our accomplishments, and our past.  We lie to others and we lie to ourselves.  Lying is one of the many dark sides of being human. 

         I have been told by another person only twice in my life, “Oh, I don’t have a dark side.”  That is a sure sign of lying to oneself.  We all have a dark side.  It is well to pay attention to it; monitor your lying, for instance.  When we refuse to look at our own darkness, it tends to act out in ways that are destructive and harmful to others.  Accepting the Shadow as a part of ourselves is one step toward becoming whole.  We may not like him/her, but he/she is as much a part of us as that sweet, mild-mannered person who would never, ever tell a lie.

                          Getting real,

                          Jane