“and if you have nothing good to say, say nothing at all,” my sweet momma would admonish.
yes, sometimes ‘you just gotta button it up’. there are those moments you know it. there are also those moments you knew it but the cat did not have your tongue and the reactionary in you reared its ugly head and you spat out something you instantly regretted.
wisdom has been passed down in quiet steadfast sages. their lessons have been lost on many; their diplomacy skipped in dna strands, oft replaced by quick tempers and faster tongues.
as jen would say, “you can’t un-say/un-see/un-know it.” good to remember.
one day, back in college, i had the good fortune of eating lunch with paul simon. the chitchat was about many things under the sun, but i wish i had asked him a bit more about this song. he said that in the inability of people to communicate, no one was listening to him and no one was listening to anyone else. as we passed by captain mike’s and the irish pub and the beach and downtown a couple days ago, i thought he clearly wrote this song about now, the middle of this global pandemic. who is listening? who is speaking? who should be speaking? who should be listening? why is the silence – truly in the middle of so much noise – so deafening?
And in the naked light I saw Ten thousand people, maybe more People talking without speaking People hearing without listening People writing songs that voices never share And no one dared Disturb the sound of silence
i wonder about a world where no one is listening, no one is paying attention. i wonder
what kind of world are we passing on to those behind us? keeping quiet, speaking out, exercising verbal self-control, standing up, articulating for what is right in the face of adversity….
and we know that sometimes it is simply best to keep your mouth shut. to wait. sometimes it is the right thing to do. sometimes it is the only way through to the other side.
silence speaks louder than words. silence is, indeed, often golden. insight, compassion, discernment, respect, knowledge, empathy, listening – all golden qualities of those who choose their words wisely, those who know when to keep their mouth shut.
“Archie’s dilemma is coping with a world that is changing in front of him. He doesn’t know what to do, except to lose his temper, mouth his poisons, look elsewhere to fix the blame for his own discomfort. He isn’t a totally evil man. He’s shrewd. But he won’t get to the root of his problem, because the root of his problem is himself, and he doesn’t know it. That is the dilemma of Archie Bunker.”
reverse threading 