For Friday, January 4: Afraid of quicksand? Then don't lie

Truth is the only safe ground to stand upon. Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Today's quote could cover many different topics of truth but I want to discuss the most basic fact of truth and that is honesty.
When we choose to tell the truth, to be honest, then we are standing on firm ground. When we choose to engage in dishonesty then we quickly can and will find ourselves in quicksand. As a parent I've been reminded of this fact about telling the truth with my own children. Teaching them to always tell the truth has been a needed refresher course for me. Through them I have seen why we are tempted to be dishonest and what happens when we choose that course of action. I have observed that we are most often tempted to be dishonest when we are scared of the consequences of whatever it is that needs to be disclosed. This clearly shows how faulty our thinking is because the consequences of being dishonest and covering up far outweighs whatever the original consequences may be. I have raised my children telling them to tell the truth because the choice to be dishonest combined with whatever they feel the need to lie about will be greater than the consequence for just being honest about the thing.
How about you? Do you find yourself standing on the firm ground of truth more often than sinking in the quicksand of dishonesty?

Comments

Butter someone up

There are two probable origins for this idiom and I think both are equally plausible. The first one is that when you spread butter on bread you are buttering it up like one would do when trying to flatter someone. The second is in ancient India there was a practice of throwing balls of butter at statues to ask for favor, i.e. buttering them up. ( source ) When we use the phrase today we generally mean that extreme flattery is used to gain information or favor. It's not always necessarily a compliment.

A dime a dozen

"It's said that in the year 1796, the first U.S. dimes were produced for circulation. Hence, it would make sense for this phrase to originate sometime after." Read more here . Today the phrase carries the meaning that something is cheap or without value if it can be lumped in with other similar or exactly-like things. It's more of an insult than anything.

Life according to van Gogh...sort of

There are two ways of thinking about painting, how not to do it and how to do it; how to do it -- with much drawing and little color; how not to do it -- with much color and little drawing. Vincent van Gogh in a l etter to Theo van Gogh, April 1882 Life is a little bit like today's quote from van Gogh. Some of us live life focusing on the drawing - the details - and have very little color. Others of us go for the color and forsake, to a degree, the drawing - the details. Unlike painting, according to van Gogh, one is not wrong over the other but somewhere in between the two would be the best I would think. If you look at some of van Gogh's paintings I feel like you can see where he might have struggled between the "how to do it" and the " how not to do it" (as he admittedly loved color so much but knew he had to focus more on the drawing) and that seems to be reflected in his life as well. In the end he wasn't able to find the ...

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