Integrity is a beautiful word; it means wholeness. We gain wholeness, integrity, through the process of living our lives. Asking ourselves to keep our curiosity, our humility, and our gaze pointed upward, is to live with integrity.Truth is a direction that we seek over the course of our lives. Seeking truth is like living out a million tiny experiments.
The perspective that you hold at any given moment is a hypothesis of truth. “I think the way I am seeing things now is correct. I’m going to live my life as if that is true and then see what happens.”
We set a course on what we think is true. We aim at it, and we see whether we are right. Any scientist will tell us that the point of running an experiment is to finding out which of the ideas you hold in your head are right and which are wrong! We are not expected to always get things right. We, all of us, make mistakes along the way–you, me, and that other guy, too.
When we find truth, we know it by the feeling of peace it gives us—by the moment of rest, satisfaction, and joy we experience. Truth is additive; the pieces we uncover are ours to keep. These prizes for our efforts come in packages both big and small. We are the sum of these pieces, adding up over the course of our lives.
Don’t be hard on yourself when you don’t get it right the first time! This is universal. This is life. Laugh, dust yourself off, and keep on looking up for your next experiment.