Lost of Honor

Last week, I talked about meeting my uncle after a decade of absence due to some wrong doing he's done. The man has lost his honor literally in an instant.

Google defines honor as: "High respect; great esteem. Adherence to what is right or to a conventional standard of conduct."

Whether you care about honor or not it is there following us like a shadow. Every decision we make affects it ever so slightly and a wrong move can destroy everything.

"A hundred years cannot repair a moment's loss of honor."
-Proverb

When you loose your honor, there's not much you can do to get it back. Your entourage will not let you forget it and perhaps the only way to get away from it is to move to a new place in an attempt to start from scratch. Your life will still not be peaceful, however, since you may then be filled with anxiety over ever being found out again. It's almost as if you are stuck re-living that moment over and over - something you cannot escape from.

In Japanese culture, when a Samurai lost his honor he would do what is called a "Seppuku" or "harakiri" which is suicide by "abdomen/belly cutting". In doing so, they believe that they would regain some of that honor they had lost.
By understanding what it means to loose your honor one can somewhat understand the reasoning behind removing one's own life.

Now if you are in such situation, I'm not suggesting that you do a Seppuku but you should be spending the rest of your life attempting to fix what you have broken. Maybe, if you've done the right things and you're lucky, people will move on.