Impeccable: flawless, incapable of sinning, perfect.
It’s one of the hardest of the agreements to follow and maintain because of human nature. We all get upset from time to time and vent to other people about the problems we experience in our lives with others. If we misunderstand a situation, or if we are at fault and don’t want to believe it, we project the fault onto the other person in our conversations with our friends. We are looking for someone to justify or rationalize our already incorrect feelings. We don’t really want the truth – we just want to be validated. And most people in our lives take on our projected opinion of the person who has hurt us or uspet us, even if they’ve never met them.
A wise person will suspend judgment no matter what is said.
When someone comes to you in order to vent about a situation or person in their lives that is bothering them – don’t take on their anger and use that to form an opinion about the person who has hurt them.
Anyway, just because I see a situation as unhealthy doesn’t mean I think terribly of anyone involved. An unhealthy situation is pretty easy to spot. But it takes two to tango, and some circumstances in separate lives just don’t mix well. No matter how much we want to hang onto those situations and people… they aren’t healthy situations to hang onto. Sometimes you just have to let go when you can’t fix it.
If you find yourself in a situation where everyone around you has formed negative opinions of people they’ve never met – ask yourself why. Ask yourself to pay attention next time to the way you present the situation – the way you talk about the people involved – and more often than not, you’ll find that you are the direct cause of those negative opinions.
If you constantly talk down about people, parade them out to be horrible people who are out to get you, out to hurt you, and are completely unstable and questionable people… chances are people in your life are going to believe you and form a similar opinion. And when you backpedal and say, “oh wait, never mind, they’re not that way at all!” people will have a hard time believing you after all that you’ve said.
So that’s why it’s important to be impeccable with your word. We all need to practice this. It doesn’t just affect our own lives, it affects everyone around us, too.