Tangled Webs

Tangled webs have been on my mind a lot recently. A lie is told, accidentally or on purpose, and what comes after that is a practice of deception unless truth is told immediately. When you or I have to tell a lie to cover up another lie then we have entered into practicing deception. And we have started to weave a tangled web.  It's going to be up to us how tangled the web becomes.

The thing about tangled webs is eventually they get destroyed.  Someone may innocently pick at part of your tangled mess of lies and begin the unraveling process.  Or perhaps someone starts purposely picking at part of your tangled web because they are suspicious.  Once one person starts picking it is only a matter of time before others can, and will, pick at other parts of the web and before we know it our tangled web of deception has been exposed and lies upon lies are revealed.

The fallout from the exposure of our practiced deception is going to be costly.  It will cost us relationships, careers, mental health, reputation, trust, and those are just the things that come to mind immediately.  It will cost more.  It will be a cost we may never be able to repay or can only be repaid partially. Trust is perhaps the biggest expense of our tangled web of deception. Once trust is broken it is incredibly hard to mend.

The interesting thing about our practiced deception is at some point we begin to believe the lies we are telling others and ourselves. We lose our sensitivity to truth. Once we begin to believe our own lies we start to justify our lies. We allow our deception to become our defense. We create more tangles in our web with the justifications we have to use in order to keep up the tangle we've gotten ourselves into.  But once that picking begins and the unraveling starts we find ourselves frantic, making mistakes, telling lies that are no longer believable, backing away from people and trying to extricate ourselves before all is revealed.  But the unraveling of our tangled web takes on a momentum of its own and we will not escape our practiced deception and the consequences of it. We will be required to face the fallout, feel the consequences, and be called into account for who we have hurt and the damage we have done.

Part of the tangled web of deception is a false belief that what we do and say affects nobody but us. That's just another lie we tell ourselves.  Deception always affects others, always. Those who have unknowingly, and unwillingly, been tangled up in the web will be hurt, feel betrayed, have anger, vacillate between disbelief and belief, and a whole host of other emotions. There will even be those who aren't tangled up in the web that get hurt.  Those just outside of the tangled mess can be affected as well.  The potential for them to feel the same degree of hurt, betrayal, anger, disbelief is real and almost certain.

Truth is like a well spun spider web. It connects, makes sense, you can see your way through it, it doesn't need to be picked at and unraveled. In a very real sense it is transparent, whereas a tangled web is opaque.

Webs, transparent or opaque, all start the same way. They start with a spun word and grow from there. It is our choice whether the web is well spun or becomes a tangled mess.