Alterations to Drapes

It is extraordinary, the multitude of slight white lies that get told or hinted at in the run of certain days. Even where harsh truth is called for, is demanded, and yet a black certainty gets denied in shades of gray. When our minds assess with shocking rapidity just what and what not our fellows, opponents, and bystanders to the piece "need to know". And it is done for ourselves, for peace of mind, to avoid unnecessary questions and complications. As if the constant truth is too bitter a pill for the speaker to mouth into words.

There are no facts, said Nietzsche, just interpretations. He who also snidely noted that a human's pride will always triumph over ugly memory. It has become an accepted, natural thing - to deceive because it is easiest, because it spares the confrontation, the challenge, the shock, the disappointment, a reckoning. And so a world gets structured.

And, so often, everyone knows. For awhile at General Motors, a company overly eager to move employees from office to office on seeming whims, there was a stupid policy that, the sizeable monies for relocation aside, refused to pay for new drapes. Only "alterations" were to be covered. This, of course, invites an obvious solution - when the new drapes are installed, amidst all the other work, the contractor is just to reference "alterations to drapes" and so help the employee recoup the losses.

The fascinating human element of all this is how one might come to actually believe, over time, that the deceptions actually contain more truth than they were meant to hold. How the mind plays tricks, and looking back, how what was clearly couched becomes the belived-in actuality. It did so happen as such. I did too behave and think and feel in such a fashion. There really are five lights. These are my old drapes, altered.

Masters we can be in such self-deception/preservation. Infuriating, vainglorious, heroic at a turn. For what other options are there?