On Keeping Your Word in Small Things

You make promises to me easily. You will write by the evening. You will have it done by Friday. You will remember next time. You say these things warmly and you mean them when you say them, and then the evening passes and you are sorry.

I do not want your apologies. I want your word to be worth something, and a word is only worth what it has been kept.

The large promises are not where you fail. You rise to those, because they feel important and you know I am watching. It is the small ones that slip. The message you said you would send. The thing you said you would stop doing. The time you said you would be ready. You treat them as if they were too small to count, and so you let them go.

They count. They are the only things that do. Anyone can keep a promise that feels like an occasion. What I notice is the one who keeps the promise nobody would have checked.

So this week you will promise me less. You will say only what you are certain you will do, and then you will do it, exactly, without being reminded. If you are not sure, you will say you are not sure. I would rather have one small thing kept than ten grand things offered.

He learned this slowly. By the end he rarely promised me anything at all, and when he did, I no longer needed to wonder.