Two Years to No Lies
Dina Kaplan
I didn’t realize how often I lied until I stopped lying completely.
It wasn’t an intentional decision. Two summers ago I did my first ten-day silent meditation retreat, and we were required to sign five vows to join the program, including a vow of honesty. I didn’t know this until I arrived. But when you’re about to begin ten days in silence, signing your name on a vow not to lie does not feel like a bold step. At the end of the retreat, however, we were told the vows, which also include no killing and no stealing, now apply to the rest of our lives.
I’ve always been a literal person, often to a fault. I have the opposite curse of a flaky person – if I say I’m going to do something, I’ll do it, even if it no longer serves my interests. Having learned that I just agreed not to lie for the rest of my life, I decided to give it a try.
I wanted to see how my life would change if I lived without lying on matters both small and large.
It’s important to note that this was not a vow of radical honesty, which has you speaking everything that’s on your mind. This was a simple vow promising that whatever you do say is true. There’s no exception for white lies or lies to comfort someone. The only exception I allowed was to protect someone. I would, without doubt, lie to save another person’s life or my own. There would be no other excuses.
Before this vow, I think it’s fair to say I was pretty honest. I don’t excessively embellish, I never lied to my investors (really), and I don’t generally lie about anything important to friends or loved ones.
But under this new vow, I was shocked at how often I lied to people about little things, unimportant items that I easily could have been truthful about. It’s almost like I had a reflex to lie only about things I had no reason to lie about. Stamping this out was primarily logistical, like learning a new language. It wasn’t ethically challenging but more like focusing on conjugating verbs properly in Italian or French.
A typical lie I would say, almost unconsciously, would would be an explanation for why I was late. I might blame the subway when my ride was smooth, and it was my fault for leaving late. At a restaurant I might say I was allergic to fish, when I simply don’t like seafood. I might say I had been to London 30 times when the reality was more like 20. I have no idea why I did this. It was a bad habit but not insidious. I knew I could fix it.