In the house I grew up in, sorry came before almost everything else. I apologised for things I had done, and for things I hadn’t. I was ashamed easily, and I learned to look over the fence and envy the neighbours. I was punished for behaving like a child, which is a strange crime for a child to commit, because there is no other way to be one.
The arithmetic of lying
The part that stayed with me longest was simple arithmetic. If I admitted the fault and told the truth, I was punished. If I lied, I was punished too, only later, and sometimes not at all if the lie held. A child does the sum quickly: later is better than now. Once both roads end in the same place, the only thing left to choose is the timing, and a child will always choose the road where the punishment is furthest away.
Nobody teaches that sum out loud. It isn’t a decision so much as a conclusion the body reaches before the mind is asked. The truth stops being a way of getting things right and becomes the thing that brings the punishment closer. A lie stops being wrong and becomes a kind of shelter, a few more hours or days before the door opens. I didn’t lie because I liked lying. I lied because, by the only maths I had, the truth never kept me safe.
That is why one line from Jesus took me years to hear properly: “the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32, KJV). As a child I’d have said the opposite. The truth was what got you caught. In my morning practice the Buddha comes at the same point from another side. Right speech, in SN 45.8, begins with “abstaining from lying”. I used to hear that as one more rule to fail. Now I hear it as a description of a mind that has nothing left to delay.
The karma of habit
That, for me, is how karma works. Not in one big moment, but in the same small choice made so many times that it stops being a choice. Each lie that put the consequences off a little longer made the next lie easier, and each time the truth felt dangerous, the fear of it grew a bit deeper. After enough repetitions the pattern ran on its own. I could be grown, out of that house, with no one left to punish me, and still feel the old pull to delay, cover and wait.
I think of it like a path across a field. Walk it once and the grass springs back. Walk it every day for years and it becomes the only way your feet know how to go, even when there is a better route right beside it. The habit didn’t care that the situation had changed. It only knew the old sum: truth gets punished, so put it off.
What the habit cost
A path like that doesn’t stay at home. It came with me into my relationships with women, and it damaged many of them. Nobody in those stories is the villain, and I don’t need one. I was carrying an old rule into rooms where it no longer applied: delay the truth, because the truth gets punished. The people closest to me were the ones who paid for it.
What strikes me now is how much the lying and the shame fed each other. Shame says you are the problem. Lying says hide the problem a little longer. Together they keep you apologising on the outside while hiding on the inside. There is a story Jesus told that breaks that loop. In Luke 15 a younger son wastes everything and comes home rehearsing his apology. Before he can finish it, “when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran” (Luke 15:20, KJV). There is no punishment waiting, and the apology isn’t even needed. For someone who grew up with sorry before everything, that father running down the road is almost unbearable to read, and it is the picture I keep coming back to.
The same envy that grew up in that house, though, had plenty of room to grow alongside the shame and the lies.
Envy and number five
Envy was part of the furniture. I learned early to look at the neighbours and feel that they had something I didn’t, and the neighbour from number five became the measure of it. Today I’d call it what it was: one-upmanship, keeping up with the Joneses. I’ve written about that neighbour before, in Can You Buy a Gift for Someone, Without Expectation? and Love Fully, Hold Loosely, and I keep coming back to number five because envy is never only about the other person. It is a mirror that shows what I’ve been told I lack. The old commandment in Exodus 20:17 names it in plain words: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house” (KJV). I don’t read that as a scolding any more. It reads like someone who knew how much time a person can lose staring at the house next door instead of living in their own.
Envy also gives shame a direction. If I am the one who has to apologise, then someone else must be the one who is getting it right, and number five was the obvious candidate. Wanting to catch up with them felt like the cure. It turned out to be the start of a knot.
The money contradiction
Alongside the apologising and the envy came another lesson, and I learned it so well I never questioned it: rich people are bad people. That put me in a trap. I wanted to be rich, mostly so I could be better than the neighbour from number five. But I couldn’t let myself be rich, because rich people were bad. The very thing that would beat number five would also turn me into someone I had been taught to despise.
That is a contradiction a person can live inside for years without naming it. One part of me pushed towards more, and another part stood ready to punish me for getting it. It was the same structure as the lying: whichever way I went, something bad was waiting. Want money and you’re greedy. Have money and you’re bad. Stay without it and number five wins. No road was safe, so the safest thing was never quite to arrive.
Money is not the problem
Today I see it differently. Being rich, to me now, means being able to help others. Money isn’t bad. How you use it is what makes a person good or bad. Money is neutral, like a ladle or a hammer; it takes the shape of the hand holding it.
The Buddha said something close to this to the householder Anathapindika in AN 4.62. He described the bliss of having “righteous wealth righteously gained”, and then the bliss of using it well, along with the bliss of owing no debt and of living without blame. Nowhere in that teaching is wealth itself the problem.
Jesus is harder on money, and I don’t want to smooth that over. When a rich young man walks away sad in Mark 10, Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25, KJV). As a child that line would have proved my rule. Reading the whole passage now, I notice the man is sad because he can’t let go of what he owns, and that the disciples are told what is impossible for people is possible for God. Elsewhere in the New Testament the warning is aimed even more precisely: “the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10, KJV). The love of it, the grip, not the coins. The question is how it was earned and where it goes. That reverses the rule I grew up with. Rich doesn’t make you bad, and poor doesn’t make you good. Use does.
That is the life I want to be allowed to want: bigger, so that more can pass through my hands to other people. In the mornings, when I chant and meditate, the knot of the money contradiction loosens into a bigger question.
Good or bad, or simply what is
Is there really such a thing as a bad or good situation? Or does a situation simply exist, and I’m the one who labels it?
There’s an old Chinese story from the Huainanzi, a Taoist-leaning text from around 139 BCE, often told today as the farmer who says “maybe”. An old man living near the frontier loses his horse. The neighbours console him; he asks how they know it isn’t a blessing. The horse comes back with a fine horse beside it. They congratulate him; he asks how they know it isn’t a misfortune. His son rides the new horse, falls and breaks his leg. When war comes, the able-bodied men are sent to fight, and the son with the broken leg stays home and lives. The text ends by saying that fortune turns into misfortune and misfortune into fortune, without end.
What I notice is that the old man never denies the events. The horse really is gone; the leg really is broken. He just refuses to sign the verdict too early. That is the opposite of what I learned as a child, where every event came with a verdict attached, usually guilty.
The Tao Te Ching says the same thing in fewer words. In chapter 58, in James Legge’s translation, misery and happiness lean on each other, and then comes the question: “Who knows what either will come to in the end?” Rumi, the Sufi poet, turned it into hospitality. In his poem known in English as “The Guest House”, from the Masnavi in Coleman Barks’s rendering, every feeling that arrives, even shame and meanness, is a visitor to be welcomed, because it may be clearing the house for something new. I like that picture next to the old man at the frontier. He doesn’t slam the door on the bad news, and he doesn’t throw a party for the good.
The eight winds
The Buddha named the same weather in AN 8.6: “gain, loss, status, disgrace, censure, praise, pleasure, & pain.” Those eight come to everyone, he said, the instructed and the uninstructed alike. The difference isn’t whether they arrive. The difference is whether they take over the mind. Envy of number five was me being blown about by gain and status. The fear of the truth was me running from censure and pain. The money rule was praise and censure dressed up as morality.
A long way from both the Buddha and the Huainanzi, the Stoic Epictetus put it bluntly: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.” The punishments, the lies, the envy and the money rule all felt like plain bad luck at the time. Some of them still hurt. But they are also how I learned what the truth costs and what money is for, and maybe that is the horse coming back.
A question for you
I don’t have to apologise for the life I have in order to want a bigger one, and I don’t have to apologise for wanting it either. If you look at the situation you’re in right now, is it really bad, or good, or is it simply what is, waiting for you to decide what it means?