Siri and the Necessity of Self Honesty

My sweet mother in law recently gave us an atlas that she suggested we keep in the car. We thanked her but inwardly giggled, smugly thinking it wouldn’t see much use since both of us have smartphones with GPS and Siri there to guide us without any effort. Ironically, about two months later, we found ourselves in a real-life Internet black hole. Without cellular service, we were hopelessly lost on some back country road that Siri hadn’t bothered mapping yet. After driving confidently in the vague direction we thought our destination was, turning around twice and ending at a dirt road that clearly wasn’t accepting visitors with bad directional senses, we admitted defeat and broke out the atlas. Large, heavy and unwieldy as a telephone book, we thumbed through pages until we found the last town we were certain we’d been in. After debating at length about our actual current whereabouts, we finally picked up a general route to help us navigate accurately back towards our goal. We were humbled to realize how little we knew about our physical location, and how reliant we were on someone else’s advice for our path. GPS works with satellite technology to pinpoint your location down to a few feet, and is usually pretty precise in doling out directional advice, but is no substitute for personal accountability. Navigating life in the direction of our goals also requires the proper information to plan a realistic route to getting there. So many people fail to reach the final destination of their dreams, even when they have the drive, the energy and the will to get there. Perhaps some of them aren’t being completely honest about where they are starting out.

If you’re not honest about where you are, how can you get where you want to be?

Starting out without brutally honest reflection would be like picking a place on the atlas that is close to your final destination simply because it looks manageable enough to navigate between those two points, ignoring the harsh reality of the fact that you’re really on a dirt road three states away. Inputting the wrong start point will never yield good directions to the end point, and may even cause you to give up and remain stuck where you are. People often overlook how important the truth is in everyday life. We tell white lies to our spouse to keep the peace, to our friends when we don’t want to hurt their feelings, to our children when we say it’s bedtime to avoid having to read Ramona Quimby for the 572nd time. Little white lies often work in our favor, which leads to slightly bigger lies to bosses or family members as we feel it’s necessary, and pretty soon we’ve built a web of deceit that is so tangled we need more than an atlas to extricate ourselves from it. Only honesty can keep that sticky web at bay and give us the correct coordinates on which to base our next directions. A recent guest at his graduation ceremony said he had spent most of his adult life lying and exaggerating to avoid pain and punishment and to pretend he was better off than he was. He finally had the insight that “the truth is big enough”, which earned him loud cheers from his peers. We’ve all felt the sticky fingers of a web of deceit we have spun, and during those times, it’s easy to swear off lying forever and promise ourselves to be honest in the future. The hard work comes in later when a little truth-stretching looks easy and the honest path seems steep and insurmountable, to still make the right choice of transparent honesty with confidence, but the rewards of a clear conscience are limitless. If you have a goal, a life’s dream, or a plan for your future, no matter how small, the only sure way to help guarantee that you get there is by taking a good long, honest look at where you are now to map the directions for your dream. Siri can’t help you with this one, either; the only person who knows exactly where you are is you.

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