Be True To Yourself

On the back of our anniversary and/or birthday A.A. coins it says "To Thine Own Self Be True."  Maybe it's on the front.  I don't know.  It's on one of the two sides.  It's not on the edge.   And why we have to use stilted Olde Timey language is beyond me as well.  Why not say "Be True To Yourself."  What?  Are we living in the 1850s?

The point is that we slowly begin to understand who we are, what's important to each of us individually, what kind of personal behavior is acceptable.  Most of the time these precepts are pretty obvious - don't murder, steal, and the like - but it's not unusual for people to have gray areas in their thought and behavior.  Everybody fudges their morals a little bit from time to time.  On their taxes, their treatment of others, their rigorous honesty.  We're trying to get better, not perfect.  But I can see how our sense of ethics becomes clearer individually as we stay sober and work on our spiritual growth.  What used to be acceptable no longer is.  The lines of demarcation become more well-define.  Sometimes I'm not perfectly honest because I don't want to hurt someone's feelings or take a simple situation and make it much worse by complicating everything.  But some of the shit I did at the drop of a hat when I was drinking are off the table today.  I can't imagine behaving the way I did.  I had no moral compass, no firm sense of what was right and wrong.