it's easier to lie

So Im living on my own again. I got a job as a teacher (who knew, BTW, sometimes I shock even myself) in a college in Eldoret, and so I had to move there, probably for the remainder of the hols till March. It's not the kind of job I'd wanted, and Im not even getting paid to do it, but in keeping with the lesson I got on 1st, Im still thankful for it. The thing about living like I am now, almost always alone except during the day when Im at work, is I get a lot of time to sit and reflect on my life. And if there's a good book around I also get to catch up on my reading. Like now Im reading Rebound: The Michael Jordan Odyssey and I've gotta say it's a lot less interesting than I'd expected. Also, me being me, I listen to a lot of rock, especially from bands that aren't considered mainstream in EMEA countries (I have no idea what those are, but I know that's how Toshiba classify Ke under when dividing their laptop markets :) ) So recently I came across a new (not really new but new to me) band called Aqualung, and they have a song called Easier to lie that just went straight to the heart.

This is what Aqualung sing and say "...to bear the weight/you push me to the sky/it's easier to lie... to be the one/to be the only one/someone has to give a lot/something has to give a lot/and who am I/to give you what you need/when Im just learning how to live and to bear the weight... it's easier to lie... and do what's right/when everything is wrong/it's easier to run... and never have to look you in the eye/it's easier to lie..." and this song has got me thinking - How many people live a lie their whole lives just because they're just trying to live up to someone else's expectations of them instead of their own? How much easier is it to just play along than tell the other person the truth and possibly disappoint them? Why is it that we find it easier to disappoint ourselves when it comes to certain people in our lives? Whenever there's a conflict between our own beliefs and the expectations of people we love therefore whose opinion of us matters, something always has to give. And it usually isn't the other person, it's us. It just doesn't feel right.

The natural order of things ought to be that we satisfy ourselves first. Coz like it or not, where rubber meets the road it's we who have to live with ourselves. If it then happens that the image we see when we look at the mirror we do not like because it's been fashioned to someone else's specifications, then we really will have no one to blame but ourselves. We'll have ourselves to blame for finding it easier to lie, for finding it easier to run than to do what's right, for being afraid that living true to ourselves might have caused us to lose "cool points" with the "in crowd". Mother Teresa speaks and says: "In the final analysis, it was never between you and them anyway." How true.

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