To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Thursday, March 14, 2019
 

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Hover through the fog and filthy air”
~ Shakespeare (Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1, 12-13)
 
The first line popped into my head out of nowhere today. When I say nowhere I mean I haven’t read or thought of this line in a long time but somehow today it just bloomed inside my head like a flower… and it seemed to connect with something that I was thinking about quite a lot in the last few days. I find it very strange that this line that happens to perfectly sum up what I was reflecting on should find its way to the surface of my consciousness… it makes me think about how all the knowledge one gathers gets synthesised in the deep recesses of one’s mind.
I have been asking myself what one must do or could do to prove oneself to be a person of solid integrity if integrity is not a given. Obviously you could ask why I need to ‘prove’ my integrity to anyone at all because if it is there it will shine through. And that has in fact been my position so far. I have always believed that when you have integrity and when you are a person whose integrity is visible in your actions (not a hypocrite), it will be obvious sooner or later to anyone who comes into frequent contact with you—if this anyone also has integrity and the sense to recognise it when they see it. If a person doesn’t have integrity, I believe they won’t see it in others because it’s not in their radar. If a person has integrity it is not necessary that they have the moral intuition or intelligence to recognise it in others, though I somehow feel that if one consciously lives with integrity as a value then it must be because they have an evolved moral sense and they would be able to notice it in others. So… it seems to me that letting your integrity or honesty or uprightness speak for itself is a good idea… and I feel that this has always worked for me…so far. I have I should say never faced a situation where I have not earned the trust and good faith of anyone whose trust and good faith I valued—I valued it because they also had integrity. By contrast, it is usually the case that when a person does not have integrity themselves, not only do they not care about integrity, I also do not care to earn their good opinion…so it works both ways.
Well… so what is the problem now? It is that I am caught in a tricky situation where simply being myself appears to not be enough to demonstrate that I am a person of integrity and it also is that I do not know if the person to whom I wish to prove that I am a person of integrity is deserving of my trust and good faith… probably even they’re facing the same dilemma where they aren’t sure about my integrity and cannot convince me of their integrity because in the environment we’re in…fair is foul and foul is fair…you do not know whom to trust or how to signal your trustworthiness especially to those whose trust you wish to gain… hmm… have I made this sound very complicated? Since there is nothing much I can do anyway I will just do what I always did… be myself… and depend on the fact that integrity will win the day… one way or the other…

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 4:22 pm 0 comments
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