In my favorite Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, they are romping together through the woods and fields. Calvin says, “Hobbes, do you think our morality is defined by our actions, or by what’s in our hearts?”

Hobbes replies, “Our actions show what’s in our hearts.”

Calvin gets very upset by this and screams back, “I resent that!”
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Most of us don’t want to see the connection between our actions and our hearts, yet cartoonist Bill Watterson is right on. Most of us are like Calvin. We like to think that our actions come from somewhere outside of ourselves.

None of us want to be judged by our acts. We all feel that we’re inherently good. We all feel that when we have done wrong, it was the devil or society or our own unconsciousness that made us do so. We all want to pretend that we’re the heroes in the story of our life, not that other shadowy character lurking within each of us, who is all too human and fallible.

And like Calvin, when we hear the unwanted truth, we scream back, “I resent that,” as if we could drown out the truth with the loudness and vehemence of our reply. However, when we ignore the truth from our Hobbes side, we end up further and further away from our true selves, from reality itself.

We have to accept that we are best reflected in our actions, and that we do act from our hearts. We have to accept this in order to go on honestly with our lives, in order to grow from our actions that have affected others and, most of all, ourselves.

Most of us, however, are quite far from the truth of ourselves. We want only quiet and false agreement from our deeper and wiser Hobbes selves. For most of us, that may well be all we’ll ever get – at least until we die and finally wake up, realizing only then all the lost possibilities of our lives and all the hurts that we have left behind. Each of us does have the capability to be a fully realized human being – yet only a few of us even make the attempt.