Confession

I have read a line by Cicero: “I’m not ashamed to confess that I’m ignorant of what I don’t know”.  I don’t know who this man was, what this man was and where he was born. But, his quotation that I happened to read while leafing through a newspaper or a magazine long ago sort of caught hold of me. It influenced me to the extent that I more often daren’t tell a lie ever since I read the quotation.

I often tend to think why people resort to lies. It may be because we don’t want to face what is real and the truth that is always bitter. If we can eat bitter gourd as vegetable, why can’t we then face the truth right away? This is a question that always baffles me.

Being human beings and being the most intelligent among all living things, it does not mean that we don’t commit a mistake. We commit a mistake willy-nilly. But, it doesn’t mean that we haven’t done anything wrong. What is wrong if we admit that we did it or that? Bragging or trying in vain to camouflage lies as truths or speaking loudly that we know about everything, that we can do everything …blah ….. blah ….. blah …. will never give us the peace that we really die for. It is true that we can never be omniscient or omnipotent. Pretending to know about everything is nothing but it is like deceiving ourselves. Lies about being omniscient don’t help us to get what we cherish in our lives. They instead instill in us a fear of being caught somewhere and sometime.

We should never feel ashamed to tell the truth even at the expense of our material pleasure (Read: job, home, family). The real pleasure of being human beings lies in telling the truth and confessing that you are ignorant of what we do not know.