3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

Now this is one I can really get behind. First of all it centers on honesty and affirms honesty as a central good and, second, it acknowledges that honesty is a skill we can build with practice. We can get better at it.

It seems to me that honesty is something we get better at as we notice that there are a series of steps we have to take to be honest. First of all, we have to recognize there is something which is the truth. Just because something is a truth claim which appears in the form of a fact doesn’t mean that it is true. I can state confidently that I am two meters tall, but that doesn’t make it true.

Second, we can discover the truth, or at the very least we can approach it. We can discover some things that are truer, or closer to true, than are others. This is hard and it takes diligence, but it is possible.

And third, we can speak the truth we discover. This takes both humility and courage, but it is possible. And we get better with practice.

What makes this hard is that what is true is often not the same as what I want to be true. Can I let go of my attachment to things being as I want them to be and simply acknowledge what they are? And can I figure out why I want things to be other than they are and, rather than insist that they are as I say, actually work to make things be more as we need them to be?