Integrity
Thinking more about contradictions and hypocrisy
Aloha. E komo mai. Welcome to They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir. Just having that title, long after I completed writing about the years I thought I would write about1, reminds me life is far from over. Letʻs find our way together into the next story worth telling. Thank you for being here and for reading.
One morning earlier this week I woke up thinking about last weekʻs essay. I woke up wondering whether - fearing that - the “apologetic” words I used to describe the arc and elements of my days and my life: “contradictory” “schizophrenic” “disjointed” or “complicated” - were really hinting at something else. A guilt, or fear, one that hums in the background of my consciousness, even upon awakening. A foundational guilt that I am making excuses for being out of integrity.
I canʻt give myself a pass by substituting “poetic” for “out of integrity” either.
Bear with me as I chew on this.
I want to start by saying that an accidental housemate, who by virtue of being such had the opportunity to observe me carefully and know me well, began referring to me (without irony) as “Miss I” - where the “I” stood for Integrity. She watched me struggle with the difficult situations my complex life threw at me in both personal and professional realms, and her assessment was that I navigated with Integrity as my hoku paʻa, my North Star. Thatʻs not how I saw or see myself. But perhaps one mark of someone whose very moniker is Integrity is their sense that they are failing to achieve their own high standards for it. I know I am harder on myself than I am on others in almost every expectation. Hard for me to accept myself as an imperfect, limited, time- and energy-constrained mortal.
Be that as it may, I still want to think and write more about integrity.
And that word that I bury so deeply that I almost have to recover it with a search engine query: hypocrisy.
A decade or so ago, walking across lava at Puʻu Huluhulu at the conclusion of a ceremony, a woman linked her arm through mine. “How can you do this,” she asked, “and do what you do for a living?”
I burst into tears.
It is unclear to me, and I never asked, whether she assumed that being sincere in my support for ʻāīna protection, selling property to newcomers made no sense; or whether she assumed that my professional activities were “the real me” and was accusing me of hypocrisy being there, using my participation in Native Hawaiian ceremony as if going to confession and being assigned three Hail Maryʻs was enough to excuse my sins until my next confession.
My tears came from her question touching that inner guilt, that inner worry about being less than perfect in how my actions aligned with my values. In the moments when I am kind to myself and others, I realize that for those of us who live a value-driven life, a service-oriented life, each day presents a set of choices and compromises. I know the damage that microplastics do to the ecosystem and to our bodies. Yet I gratefully accept the bottle of water offered to me at after a sweaty beach clean up or at a local event where I lingered long past the point where Iʻd drunk all the water in my BPA-free reusable water bottle.
Iʻve been worrying about this since my twenties, as a graduate student at Colorado School of Mines and a declared environmentalist. My retort when attacked was along the lines of Did you drive here in your car? Do you have heat in your house? Then you seem to use about the same amount of metals and plastics and fossil fuels that I do. I am attempting to use the tools of economic theory to prove to mining companies that the benefits of environmental protection to them and their employees can offset the costs to them. I am attempting to open minds and mitigate the long-term damage. What are you doing other than pointing fingers at the “rapers and scrapers?”
But like the woman walking with me across the lava, they had hit a nerve.
At an engineering college, integrity also has another meaning. Structural integrity is what keeps a building or bridge or dam functional and safe. The dictionary definition is “the ability of a structure to withstand an intended load without failing due to fracture, deformation, or fatigue.”
When I have personal integrity, people feel they can count on me to be functional and safe. They count on my honesty, dependability, responsibility and accountability. I am trustworthy not because I am perfect, but because I am self-aware of when my actions are out of alignment with my stated values, and because I accept feedback from others. I take responsibility for my behaviors including my failings and mistakes. Sometimes that means making amends or committing to do better. Sometimes that means forgiving myself for being human, acknowledging that we are humans needing to make often difficult, imperfect choices within the social and economic system in which we find ourselves in this life.
It also means that if I take on too great a load, I may fail due to fracture, deformation or fatigue. Integrity as a structural concept takes into account that there are forces and factors beyond my control. Those are the externally imposed limits to my integrity. Those are the places where I might be compromised, the places I fail.
In a podcast I listened to as I did my six-mile training hike this week, one of the hosts cited a conversation with a civil rights advocate who reminded her that the movement had made progress by accepting todayʻs compromise while remaining fully committed to the ultimate goal. By looking to the long game. Part of being human is being temporal - in both senses of the word. As a being limited in time, and as operating in the real world rather than in the eternal state of goodness promised by religions and spiritual traditions as the goal, or as the true nature, of being.
Like knowing that it would be really hard for me to climb the Bright Angel Trail today2, but I can be a bit closer to my goal each day with conscious, daily practice. Achieving big goals take time and disciplined effort.
When it comes to integrity, I do know I get up each day trying harder than most. Maybe that is a glimmer of wisdom from seven decades of living with living consciously as a value. Or maybe it is a neurotic need to be perfect or at least at the head of the class. For me, there is a fine line between codependency and the value of caring for others in reciprocity. There is a fine line between ambitious striving and genuine commitment. Integrity lies on the healthy side of those lines.
As the common phrase goes, integrity is doing what is in alignment with your values even when no one is looking. Integrity is a thousand small things.
Numbered for those who wanted to read sequentially, tagged here.
New here? I am writing poetry and floating the Colorado River a few short weeks from now.
Beth -- small thing but I think you'd want to know: check sp of hypocrisy in your title. x