Living life: Body of Lies

Since just like you, I am also human, I will confess of some of my obvious misdemeanours. One, just like you, I am a prolific liar. I wake up in the morning, sore and tired from a night of binge drinking and tell myself am going to have a very nice day. I proceed through the routine of getting ready to go to the place where I earn a leaving telling myself, it’s all fine, nobody knows when you got home last night. I arrange a plastic smile to cover up the guilt that I cannot help but drag along. There I am merry and fresh, ready to face the world for another challenging day with a multitude of strangers who despite their different states of misery, demand to be smiled at even when they are wearing the longest smirk in the world, expect to be treated like kings and queens because they have a few coins jingling in their pockets and are more than willing to let you know that they are here only to make your life better. This is our body of lies. Life is very interesting. The only reason why we are human is because we are fallible. We sin creatively, and have the freedom to choose right and wrong. It is no wonder we most of the time choose to do the wrong thing. Of course, our respective books of our different faiths extort to be angelic, avoid sin or repent profusely each after every time we sin – some humans now repent in advance of sin. Yet it is not in our nature to be perfect. In fact usually very perfect individuals on the outside normally have their own skeletons in the closet and those who truly and really approach sainthood, like Mother Theresa and Nelson Mandela are usually simple fellows without the nascent desires for self glorification and material things. We loath others who do bad things but we regularly continue to perpetrate our own sins against fellow humans. So, do we humans have any sense of shame? Are we potentially good and bad at the same time to the extent that, we are actually all the same, with the same sense of values and the same personal potential to be nasty? We hate and love, are envious and sympathetic, we laugh and cry, we hope and despair, we bear children and we kill other people’s children, and we are born and we eventually die. In the morning, when like you, I carry myself around with my sense of secret guilt, but displaying the demeanour of a human being whose only direction is to the top of the world, am just being human. Good enough, life does not depend on some predetermined chart of events. We can make good out of evil just as we can make evil out of good. It all depends on the body of lies, good and bad, we are willing to wish onto ourselves, our days, our future, and maybe our after life. It is a shameful thing to lie, but we lie everyday. Sometimes our lives are lies and we still get to live another day. But however deceitful we are, we should always know that we are just simple fallible imperfect humans, who can choose good or evil and while at it realize that they are two simple truths in life – birth and death (with taxes) and what happens to you between them is entirely up to you. Have a lie-free Sunday. kelviod@yahoo.com