Mea Culpa

When I checked my work email this morning, I saw an email from a colleague who is kind of in a supervisory role asking me for a status on something she thought she had asked me to do. I was on the verge of replying to her email denying any knowledge about what she was asking me about when wiser counsels prevailed and I decided to go thorough all my emails from her for the past week to see if I had missed something. Sure enough there was an email from her on Thursday asking me to do something and to my horror I now remembered reading it then.
Only one workday had passed and I could have easily replied to her email saying I planned to do it today without any explanation. I could have said I was swamped on Friday(which was true) and that I would do it today. But the truth is that I forgot and the truth is that no matter how busy I was on Friday, this was important, and I could have found a way to squeeze it in.
With all the emails flying around and things piling on my plate, it was easy for something to fall through the cracks. Moreover I do not have a relationship of trust with this person and I did not trust her to not make a big deal of this behind my back.
But somehow other than a simple acknowledgement of the fact that I forgot and that I would do it today, nothing else felt right. This is not about one of those eightfold ‘right’ something or the other that almost drove me away from Buddhism. I guess it is a simple question of integrity and the truth that I would not feel good if I covered this up.
The calculating part of me opined that maybe by speaking the truth here, I could build up some credibility, so that when I really needed to fudge the truth, I would be readily believed. I had to smile at this cunning and say to myself, “No. No agendas here. Just one simple action. That’s all”. So, I wrote a simple email saying “I missed this. Will get to it today and let you know”.
I remember going to Ramana Ashram in India and asking one of the caretakers for advice on how best to practice self-enquiry and his advice was “First, simplify your life”. Romantic notions of changing careers and taking up the simple life on a boatman ferrying people across the river floated before my eyes. But the physical work involved there seemed daunting. The idea of being a toll collector in a highway booth also seemed appealing. But, in the absence of any such dramatic changes of vocation, I can try to simplify the way I go about my current job.