my life, with nothing being too small or insignificant to do with integrity.
My reason and motivation for allowing integrity to rule my decisions was that I perceived the value of integrity during my Air Force career. I realized that integrity is so crucial to a healthy society and a healthy individual that to operate in anything less than integrity would eventually come back against me and the society I live in. I had never made that connection before, so my integrity up to that point had been more relative and subjectiveùif I felt like it, I did it; if I didnÆt, I didnÆt bother. Also for the first time, I began to see the aftereffects of not living with integrity. I started to notice what happened in the lives of people around me who failed to live with integrity, and I had to acknowledge that although they seemed to be getting away with deception and duplicity at the time, in the end it always caused suffering for them and those they had cheated.
Although doing the right thing is not always easy, it became easier after I saw that it would pay off for me in the end. People who lied had to work hard to keep their lies straight, sometimes telling a thousand new lies to cover up the old one. Then, their lies were almost always discovered, getting them into trouble at work, at home, or with their friends. One person who told a little white lie on a job application ended up getting fired from her new job because someone found out about the lie through a series of coincidences, and this portrayed her as someone who could not be trusted. Another person, an old friend of mine from school, got into a huge mess over having an affa
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