I was at a conference recently where the meeting was held on a floor several flights of stairs above where we entered the building.
All of us attendees climbed the wide, winding stairway, chatting away, turning corner after corner as the stairs wound upward, and all arrived at the designated conference room.
The meeting was excellent and went as planned.
However, upon leaving the room and retracing our steps down the wide, winding stairway, chatting away, turning corner after corner as we descended, all of us reached the floor where we had entered the building but some of our group, those who had been leading the way, kept right on going, chatting away, turning corner after corner, down and down because, after all, the wide, winding stairway continued on and on, down and down.
It wasn’t until they reached the basement that they realized somewhere they had turned too many corners and lost their way, which required them to retrace their steps to find the rest of the group and exit the building the way we had all come in.
It was all amusing and we all had a good laugh about it, but it also made me think about April Fool’s Day which is right around the corner.
National Honesty Day isn’t until April 30. That’s the day set aside for truth-telling.
April 1, however, right around the corner, is when falsehood – where we are led to believe something is true when it’s not – is all so much fun and games.
Basically, the only ‘rule’ of engagement for those engaging in guile on April 1 is to expose their prank by shouting ‘April Fool.’ That way people know that what you said or did you really didn’t mean to say or do.
As people, we are so easily led astray, sometimes finding ourselves in the basement before we discover somewhere we lost our way.
Commenting on the human condition, Jean-Fransois Revel said, “A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.”
Likewise, Jeffrey Sachs, writing for “Huffington Post” commented that “our society increasingly values people and their behavior according to their wealth, not to their integrity.”
And John Grisham wrote in his novel “Sycamore Row” (p.223), “Ethics are determined by what they catch you doing. If you don’t get caught, then you haven’t violated any ethics.”
Like railroad tracks run rather straight and true, so trust should be based on truth, and truth on transparency, and transparency on integrity, so that today, and tomorrow, and the day after that, the wide and winding stairways lead us, and those with us, to the right destination.
Thus, minimizing the need for retracing our steps.
