A lie has speed but the truth has endurance.

We spend endless hours and endless days hiding behind the consequences of a truth or a version of it anyway.

When a lifetime of passing the baton of another’s misfortune sneaks up one day and blows the lie to smithereens. The pieces of the lies float down like ashes of a past not dealt with properly. A sadness of a life well lived and the tentacles that kept hovering to draw goodness into badness.

Sadly, the ashes never dissipated completely and the little flickers of misfortune appear from time to time as the opportunists stand in line to watch the torture again and plan the next attack—to blow you away. Out of the picture the “inconvenience”must go….

Poof.

Little pranks become bigger and bigger until the back breaks under the pressure. The look-away stares from the embarrassed person who stands alone in the middle . The snubs of a person who just wants to be like, included.

The “pile on” piles on. With cold stoned frigidity the cold shoulder snowballs into a giant iceberg of coldness and rigidity as defensive action is the only way to cope with an existence onward. Looking over the shoulder becomes commonplace and a common occurrence. Over and over. Again and again.

Small. Tiny. It begins with a white lie. A crooked smile.A shoulder shrug. Afraid to admit the cold hard truth of a life slipping through the cracks of another person’s lack of love. Some say, a person cannot give what they do not have to give. Pushed beyond the limits of one’s own limitations. Empty.

Patterns tend to repeat. Chained patterns can and are broken. Tenacity is the name of the game. Playing dirty is not nor never the game plan. Why? Because it does not work.

The white lie is covered up. The crooked smile becomes even more crooked. Life moves on as normal—whatever that means. Snowballs in hell melt like the lie eventually does.

Persons’ sideways glance at the person standing naked in the middle of the room—the nakedness holds the truth that others are afraid to utter. The nakedness holds tight that the struggling person doesn’t even care anymore. The lies and innuendos took their toll on the souls of the liars, and they kept on keeping on. Busily planning the next move.

With the truth of their lies.

The lonely one stood there for too many years looking for a friend. What the lonely one desperately found out was that liars stick together. Talk about a burden of proof. The burden comes mired and mixed in the pile-on, while the back breaking is left to the ones who side with the lack of admittance. Of truth.

Preferring the other to live with the consequences they alone cannot or choose not to bear. Just leave it to the weaker and squash them like a bug. There supposedly is safety in numbers, I guess. That way the group think becomes the truth no one else dare challenge.

There is safety in numbers and it may be a cold day in hell when the liars spring forward to tell the truth of what once was. Perspectives have a way of changing the story and nowadays a lie can make it halfway around the world in a nanosecond.

The good news: Truth is endurance. The enduring of it is its own reward. Intimidations and discouragement may be the shot in the arm of a finagler finagling his way into the picture looking for the deal, to seal the deal.

It is very easy to get caught up in the “rightness.” We can get carried away with our own arrogance and aplomb. We pat ourselves on the back as we live to see another day. Hurray.

We hear the gossip, we hear the misfortune of someone we used to like and we like it. We like it when an enemy or a frenemy is struggling as we may be jealous of his or her good fortune.

The only way is down for them, we think. They need to be “humbled.” It becomes our perogative to take the action to bring them down at all costs for however long it may take. Forever, even.

The good news: Truth is endurance. Truth is energizing. A lie drags down even the most superficial charmer in the room.

It does.

They will succeed, for a time, in projection. Onto the weaker. Call it survival of the fittest and it exists in this century although it looks mighty different than a lion eating a gazelle.

Click bait the story of another’s misfortune and the day is made good. The day is made new. I feel so much better about me. The pecking order has changed and now I have new life.

Think of truth, lies and consequences as a marathon. A lie has speed. The shorter run? In the short run, the lies may work, yet it really takes up so much energy to keep the story “straight.” Emotional, dramatic, mind numbing fictional stories take a creative energy like no other. Perhaps that is why the tiny dancer stays tiny and bull dozes past the liars like the flicker of the ash falling down from the past explosion.💥 of the other lies. See where this is going?

Nowhere.

Yes.

Nowhere.

Truth be told, the truth is not always told. It isn’t. Gargantuan as it may seem, gossip, innuendo and clicker-ey fingers now do the talking when the mouth can no longer speak the truth.

Sputtering a mouthful of meanness in place of a kind word, well, is downright mean.

”Keep your words short and sweet because you never know when you may have to eat them.”

And. They are not always yummy. So.Why not just tell the truth even if and when it hurts like hell. Will it set you “free.” Doubtful. Even the truth can’t unshake our minds from the hang ups of our mistakes and misfortune.

Only we can change what we see when having a heart to heart with that person in the mirror. We can change. Day by day. Today’s tomorrow is the future of forgiveness and the soul building needed to getting it better and getting better at it than the day before.