Who’s Coming to Your Funeral?

What secrets do you keep?

And from who? And why? What are you afraid of?

I’ve never been good at keeping secrets.

In fact, I keep wanting to run a personal policy of “full disclosure” and I never succeed at it. When I was in my final year at school, I decided to write a “truth letter” to each of my closest friends. Four letters.

I laid out as clearly as I could EXACTLY what I thought of each one.

Interestingly, I got very little blow back. In fact, it was mostly embarrassed silences. I had walked across an unspoken boundary, and silence was my reply.

Don’t get me wrong – I have my secrets. Don’t you?

Of course, the Pollyanna “I’m-so-nice” answer that I first came up with was: I keep my stuff secret to protect others. Won’t my old aunt be upset if she hears about my sexual escapades?

It’s not THOSE kind of secrets I refer to.

It’s identity secrets. Who are you doing those funny things with? What activities do you get up to that you don’t want your family - or even your friends - to know about? Do you have your life segregated into different collections of people?

In Japan they have two terms for it: Honne and Tatemae.

In English, the equivalent terms might be Private and Public faces. However, Japanese have this perfected beyond anything we have in the West. It is an art – there can be many more faces. Think five or six – do you know anyone with that many faces?

Of course you don’t – how can you? I’ve been told that no-one really knows a Japanese until their funeral happens…

Because all these people show up who are strangers to each other.

Who’s going to show up at your funeral?

Anyway, the point of this is that I sense that your secrets promote disharmony: they are blockades on your energy flow; they are frozen out of sight by tension in your neuro-muscular system. Why keep them?

Join me for a day considering that.