I was in a meeting a few days ago and the importance of keeping our promises was mentioned. In this context it was all about the importance of keeping to our work commitments once we’d made them, but of course keeping our promises has a much wider remit beyond our work environment.
I would suggest that those who are able to keep all their promises are probably few, after all have you ever made a promise and then broken it? A promise to cook dinner, to walk the dog or get your report in on time? It seems that promises these days don’t have the ring of secureness that they will be carried out and so this challenges the definition we apply to them.
It seemed sensible at this juncture to take a peek in the dictionary to double-check my understanding and this is what it said:
“A declaration or assurance that one will do something or that a particular thing will happen.”
That seems straight forward enough. An up-front commitment to do/not do something in the future, so as to ensure a particular outcome, but as I’ve said earlier, this no longer seems to hold true in many cases, and so I wondered whether ‘vows’ would be a better choice for those promises we truly intend to keep.