It should be contagious, like a cold. We should receive and be transformed by it as easily as sunlight making vitamin D inside the cells of our skin. Integrity should be as easy – and as important – as our every breath.
And yet we think of it as a nebulous higher quality, don’t we, something that we aspire to achieve rather than something that we are, something that is inherent in the state of our daily being?
It is about making decisions that your future self will be proud of.
That’s how I’ve occasionally defined integrity to some people. By “some people” I mean my children, and perhaps a few of their friends. I’ve not had much opportunity to do that, really; teens and young adults don’t want to hear too much moralizing from their own or someone else’s parent.
And it can sound that way, can’t it? A reference to integrity can sound like a sermon from a plinth or pulpit.
The news media is full of integrity angst. Not a week goes by, it seems, without some sad, head-shaking, gut-clenching or otherwise astonishing revelation of non-integrous decision-making or action by public figures and officials. Some leaders defend their ‘personal integrity’. Others challenge someone else’s. And some admit to first losing and then regaining their integrity, as if it’s something slippery and elusive, a behavioral code balanced atop their genetic code that can slip away as quickly as a scoop of ice cream from a sugar cone.
Maybe it is. I don’t really know. I just wish it wasn’t so difficult to have integrity, to be “integrous”. Even the words feel distant. And that’s not right. Integrity should be simple. It shouldn’t be arcane or conceptually challenging.
My refrigerator might have the answer. It’s right there, on the door. I am face-to-face with it many times a day and yet I’ve forgotten to see what’s in front of me. Five words printed on a magnet that is part of a tapestry of photos, sayings, and reminders.
All I need to do is ask myself, at any time during the day, one of these questions: Am I being kind? How about brave? Am I being honest? Am I generous?
Living with integrity may not easy. But having those questions so readily accessible can be. Sure, there is much to consider inside the values of kindness, courage, honesty, and generosity. I don’t, however, need to fully unpack those values to know if, at any moment, what I am doing, thinking, or intending meets the basic criteria. I can do my best to be kind, brave, honest, and generous. I can admit when I’m not succeeding and try harder.
We all have Ys in the roads of our lives. These are significant branch points, decisions to go left or go right. When I idle at those forks in my own life, I like to imagine myself as an old man, looking back at the current me. The older guy knows how things worked out. He knows what choice was appropriate, especially if the options have implications for others and not just myself. That fellow lifts an eyebrow at me across time when he sees me lean down a path that is selfish or self-serving. He’s old, after all. He doesn’t care if the right choice was more difficult. He watches me, with a hawk eye, hoping that I will show big scale integrity.
The life I lead everyday does not always need that eyebrow-flicking fellow. It involves lots of decisions, many small and seemingly inconsequential, and yet most meaningful in some way, to people around me. Did I smile instead of frown? Am I listening rather than talking? Does what I am rushing to do need to happen so quickly? I can think of no better guideposts for the daily meanderings of my life than the five words stuck in plain site on my refrigerator door.
Who knew that integrity could be so cool.