03 Apr What’s Your Story: To Tell The Truth
Earlier this week, I wrote a piece on “Two Wolves In The Heart.” It focused on the dual nature that resides within all of us, the wolf of love and the wolf of anger. The wolf of love stems from our desire for connection, compassion and caring. The wolf of anger is propelled from our need to self-protect and defend against hurt, attack, rejection and disappointment. The first comes out of transparency, authenticity and honesty. The second from suspicion, worry, distortion and lying. It takes more than courage to tell the truth. Courage has to do with taking action even though you are afraid. But under the force of courage lies another resource that has to do with connection and caring: that you will tell the truth no matter what, even if it makes you look bad at the moment.
Consider this example: you and a friend have been confronted by an authority figure, like a parent or school principal, to own up to a misdeed such as cheating on a test or stealing. The authority may look at you and says something like, “I know this wasn’t your idea, you would never do anything like this. Just tell me what happened and I won’t call you mother!” At this moment, the wolf of fear and anxiety tears through your caring brain and yells out, “It wasn’t my fault, I just followed along because he (your so-called best friend) said we would not get in trouble.” So you give up your friend to face the music and punishment alone while you sheepishly slip away, apparently without punishment, only to carry the shame of betrayal and cowardice for a very long time afterwards. You now have to live with the fact that you let the wolf of anxiety and survival win over your wolf of love and friendship.
With that in mind, let’s look at the disappearance of Flight 370 last month as it flew from Malaysia to China. Shortly into the flight, somewhere between cocktails and magazine reading, the plane disappeared and was missing for weeks! How can this occur, with all of our technology, in an age of technological capture where planes are tracked from takeoff to landing? Planes just don’t disappear out of thin air. Or do they? Was it a terrorist act? A mechanical failure? An alien abduction? A pilot’s suicide? A mistake?
The world is thrown into a very uncomfortable reality: we are supposed to know and trust technology and those who control the flight industry aren’t we? Isn’t air travel supposed to be one of the safest ways to travel? If it is, there is not much comfort in how the powers-that-be in the airline industry are now making us now feel. I, for one, am left with a combination of curiosity, suspicion, annoyance and anxiety. I find myself thinking, is there another missile being prepared to be launched on innocent people? I guess my wolf of anxiety is coming out!
Maybe we are seeing the Malaysian Wolf Of Anxiety at play! The airline authorities and the government could have simply told the truth upfront, but they screwed up! They did not track the plane nor carry out normal and established standard operating procedures for whatever reasons. They simply failed to follow up when a plane did not follow its agreed upon flight pattern. In other words, it would have made sense to send an interceptor plane out to investigate at that early moment of disappearance. But they did not do so! They made up a story that had nothing to do with the plane’s flight pattern. In other words, they covered their asses and lied!
Recently, they found debris that is thought to be from the plane, leading investigators to believe that it did in fact crash somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Yet the full wreckage still has not been found. Millions of dollars later, weeks of random searches, families and friends in panic and depression, and many in the world also anxious and confused, still, no one really knows what is going on. Sure looks like a cover up to me! The wolf of anxiety prevails once again! Don’t be real, transparent, tell the truth or ask for help. Make believe you know what you are doing at the expense of others, just like the kid who throws his friend under the bus to avoid the principal’s punishment. Maybe, it is not a function of age. When confronted with a screw-up, the wolf of anxiety shoves its way into the situation and takes over. Survive at any cost! It’s either you or me! Get the other guy before he gets you!
We still don’t know what really happened on that plane, or what the real truth is about what the Malaysian authorities did or did not know. My suspicion is that the wolf of anxiety led to delay and distortions of information and unnecessary pain and confusion for the relatives and friends of the passengers and a lot of useless drama and mystery for the rest of the world.
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