Prevarication

"To stray from or evade the truth; equivocate.."

I am  not a good liar. There are times when that trait would be very useful..

But I simply cannot live with the consequences of prevarication. Even the word makes it sound okay. I like the word "equivocate" just as much. It sound like I would LIKE to tell the truth, but I simply can't. Sorry Truth, I was rooting for you,  but it simply didn't work out this time. Maybe next time.

Yesterday I intentionally practiced prevarication with my boss. Not a huge deal. I am on a trip to meet with an underperforming rep, at the last minute the rep informed me (long after the plane tickets were bought) that he "thinks he has passover" on Monday. Really? It came to you last minute? I can tell you right now when Easter and Christmas are this year, and next, and the one after that. But the trip was planned and I didn't want the hassle of changing flight schedules, hotels, etc.

Now I had several long phone calls where I asked him to bring this and that. We discussed several aspects of his territory. These were preparatory conversations and ones that were going to take place anyway. And I found them mildly annoying because this was not the training scenario that I had developed in my head. So I was frustrated.

Then my boss called and during the conversation asked in passing how it was going with the rep, I told it was fine, we were covering the basics and would dig deeper the next day. I have worked with this guy long enough to know what he was asking, but I prevaricated. I answered the questions as if the rep and I had spoken in person, but I knew that my boss had not gotten the correct picture of what had happened. Essentailly, I had answered what he had asked, but had evaded the "truth" of his questions.

In years past this would have produced a pang of guilt, quickly over and soon forgotten. Perhaps when I was younger, it was easier. But this small omission, hinging really on one word in his question and a small word in my answer kept me up all night. Rattling around in my head was not so much the variety of ways that the real truth could come out, but the reality that I had violated some deep-seated view of myself. Several times during the night I was tempted to pick up the phone, reclarify the question and get this out of my head. By the time I decided to call it was midnight in California and it would seem even more bizarre than the original innocuous question.

Why does this matter so much to me now? Our culture does not put much of a premium on honesty or integrity or truthfulness. Our cornerstone institutions put no real emphasis on these traits either. In fact it seems that the world around us values the imagination applied to creative prevarication. How far can one stray from  the truth and not be considered a liar? It is not a line in the sand, but a continuum from stark truth to any small ingredient of truth. The continuum is a mile wide and paper-thin. It bothers me now because I know better. There is no illusion that I was telling the truth, I can fool a lot of people, but my conscience calls me on it everytime. My bride can do just about as well. Words are usually my friends until they convict me inside my own brain. The older I get the less truth is subjective, it has become objective. What I say and do is either the truth or it is not. Very simple, very hard.

So I left a text for my boss very early the next morning asking him to call, not an emergency, but call as early as you can. He called, I went straight to the confession, offering no qualifiers (by the way, a true apology offers no reasons, no qualifiers, it is a simple "I'm sorry")  He said he trusted me 1000%, he felt it odd that my answer was uncharacteristically short (not sure what he meant there) and to move on. The situation still bothered me during the day, but more of a dissapointment in myself, than a reliving the event. Am I the only one that is bothered by this? I suspect not, but it still pesters me that I slipped out of my own self-image so easily, and for no real reason. At this point I guess the moral victory here is that I was bothered by the entire episode. I liked last year's model of me much better. Sigh.

Godspeed out there. Self realization can be tough, but at least be truthful to yourself.
Don