Beware the risks of speaking yourself into a lie

Someone I once knew passed away this summer.

People touch each other in peculiar ways. This particular person taught me something extremely important.

Never, ever break my word.

Not if it is humanly possible to keep it.

His was a negative example, not a positive one.

He made promises easily, glibly.

Eventually, I realized why. Somewhere along the line, he’d picked up a terrible habit.

Promises, for him, were his default technique for resolving conflict — for soothing anxiety.

Someone was disappointed in him? He’d make a promise. Money problems? He’d make a promise. Unable to advance his career? Make a promise. Unable to find meaning in his life? Make a promise.

Making promises was a relief to him. Making promises seemed to make his problems back away. It seemed to win him a little space.

Up until the day he died, he was making promises. Here was the luxury car he was going to buy. Here were his plans for downsizing into an apartment. Here was his fascinating book that would soon be published.

He believed in his promises, as he was speaking them. Wholly. As he emitted a promise from his lips, he believed every word, believed himself to be wholly committed, believed he would do everything in his power to make the promised thing come to pass.

So to him, they weren’t lies. He meant them, when he spoke them, so they weren’t lies.

Except that they were.

His promises were not made to other people.

This was something else, I learned from him.

On the contrary. Every time he made a promise, he was making it to himself.

And that, as they said in the olden days, was his undoing.

The words he spoke, which should have been an honest agreement with a future version of himself, were meaningless.

He couldn’t speak the words “I’m going to do such-and-such” and have his words mean anything.

And here’s why that matters:

Without the ability to state something, with authority, about what you will do — about what you will be — in the future, you render yourself powerless.

I mean that literally.

This person I once knew was, in the end, utterly unable to change anything in his life.

The best he could do was to get other people to do things for him. Give him money. Drive him to the store.

I cried, when I learned he died.

Not when I first got the news.

It was a week or two later, when I learned a bit more about how he’d been living at the end.

He’d melted away. A man who’d come into this world with exceptional gifts, with intelligence, with exceptional physical strength and stamina, with ferocious ambitions.

He’d melted away.

RIP, this person — a person I once knew.

And thank the Lord for the lesson I learned from the time I spent with you.

I learned that I must never, ever, make a promise lightly.

I learned that my choice was to either say nothing at all. Or to commit myself to move heaven and earth, if necessary, to make good on the promise I’d made.

I learned that words have power.

Literally. They organize our energy and our focus. They direct our attention. They shape the image we form of who we are and where we are going. They create a template into which we’re continually stepping.

That old Laurie Anderson song. “You don’t always realize it, but you’re always falling. With each step, you fall forward slightly and then catch yourself from falling…”

We take a step toward our future. And with each step we’re also falling.

And the template we’ve built with our words catches us from falling.

But if you break your word to yourself too often, you’ll teach yourself that your words mean nothing, and if you do that, there will be no template to catch you. Because a split second after you speak an idle, un-meant template into being, it begins to melt away — and you begin to melt away with it.

So, by all means, make New Year’s Resolutions if you wish.

Just don’t make them lightly. Ever.

Ever.

Think about not only what you want to do, but what you can do.

And when you think about what you can do, be rigorously, painstakingly, excruciatingly honest with yourself.

Call “stretch goals” what they are. Goals you might not be able to achieve.

Make “resolutions” only to things you are absolutely committed (resolved!) to accomplish.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love its use will eat its fruit.

Proverbs 18:21

Happy New Year, and blessings to you and yours.

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