Waking up with yourself
I spent the evening thinking about the word integrity and trying not to buy too strongly into any moral outrage or pull that I’ve been having over a series of issues and events that have recently occurred near me. I have been the victim of soapbox preachers – a niece who won’t speak to me because of an affair and a brother who thinks it is wrong for me to love a woman. So I certainly don’t want to be the one who grabs the microphone. The more I read over the description that Stanford put out about integrity the more I realized what it means to me – it means: waking up with yourself.
I watched my husband of 16 years behave with utmost integrity particularly when I handed him a bomb. I’ve seen several of my closest friends without hesitation do the right thing when they could have gotten away with far more. I remember my niece telling my brother that driving safely was an obligation he had to not hurt others (everyone in my family drives like crazy).
So I came to this understanding of what integrity means to me … I have a relationship with myself and I am proud of who I am and what I do. And I maintain the tenets of that relationship not because it will lead to personal gain (because often, sadly, it does not), but because when I wake up with myself in the morning I like who I see in the mirror and that is who I portray to the world at large. For this, there is no remuneration, no accolades, no gold stars – there is only me, myself and I … and of course, the smile on my face.