Light Secrets

You don't need to confess, but you probably have some. Plus The Heard

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Photo by Stefan Steinbauer on Unsplash

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DO YOU HAVE A LIGHT SECRET?

Recently I read a great, strange, entertaining short story, “Light Secrets,”¹ by Joseph O’Neill. I read fiction for fun, not in order to find TAoN-friendly ideas. But the notion of the “light secret” jumped out as a delightful, and I think useful, concept. So I’m sharing it with you here.

Here’s how it comes up in the story (for our purposes, context and character details can be set aside):

P. says, “Everybody’s got something to hide. Everybody.” He wears his usual gloomy face. With no lessening of the gloom, he says, “But you know what else is true? Everybody’s done something good that’s hidden—the opposite of a dark secret.”

“A light secret,” I suggest.

“Precisely,” P. says.

“Like an anonymous donation?”

P. shrugs. “It could be a lot more interesting than that.”