Chapter
17
It also proves a fertile source
of troubles if you take pains to conceal your feelings and never show yourself
to anyone undisguised, but, as many men do, live an artificial life, in order
to impose upon others.
For the constant watching of
himself becomes a torment to a man, and he dreads being caught doing something
at variance with his usual habits, and, indeed, we never can be at our ease if
we imagine that everyone who looks at us is weighing our real value.
For many things occur which strip
people of their disguise, however reluctantly they may part with it, and even
if all this trouble about oneself is successful, still life is neither happy nor
safe when one always has to wear a mask.
It will require deliberate commitment, and it may
take some time, but I learn that my happiness cannot be won at the price of
constant conflict and anxiety. Peace of mind is found in balance rather than in
extremes, working with things instead of against them, and a simple mastery over
self in contrast to attempting an entangled mastery over others.
Nor is any of it possible without sincerity,
without honestly and humbly being one and the same person through and through.
There can be no trickery and no deception, no disguising a coldness and
frustration on the inside with a show of alluring impressions on the outside. So
many of my troubles come from thinking that life must be like playing some sort
of clever game.
I have seen far more wickedness than I would like,
sometimes far more than I thought I could bear, and I can’t help but notice how
so much of it is tied together with a priority of appearances. The concern is not
with being good but with seeming good, not with earning merit but with winning
praise. There is a discord between the inner self and the outer impression, and
it should then come as no surprise that we can’t be fair and honest with others
when we can’t first be fair and honest with ourselves.
I might at first think that such people are
winning, yet I only need to look more closely to see how much they are losing.
They say that one of the problems with being a liar is that it’s so hard to
keep your story straight, to keep tabs on all the different distortions you
have cast about. If life requires constructing and maintaining an elaborate
artifice, the greatest fear will be that it will suddenly all fall down. There
can be no peace of mind in the middle of that kind of unease.
I recall one painful conversation with an academic
administrator, where he lectured me at length on how maintaining the “branding”
of the university often required overlooking the particular needs of individual
faculty or students. “We won’t make any money by being the nice guys. Like with
any product, it’s all in the spin.”
I couldn’t resist a mischievous joke. “So if I sent
copies of our chat, which I have just recorded, to donors and parents, would
that help or hinder the promotion of our brand?”
I had done nothing of the sort, of course, but the
look of complete horror on his face for a moment was priceless. They say that
our lives flash before our eyes before we die, and I can only imagine how his
entire professional career, so full of false advertising and broken promises, now
flashed before his. What would become of him if all the lies were exposed?
How much simpler it would be to simply be. How much
purer it would be to build character instead of reputation, where the former is
completely my own and the latter is always reliant on the whims of others.
Fakery is no substitute for integrity, and merely
mouthing certain words doesn’t change the reality.
Written in 1/2012
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