Not Speaking/Silence

This page began as a loop. I took something from the middle of another page and put it at the top, building on it. After posting the short loop, I added other, loosely-related thoughts below it, and it has grown to the current iteration of this page.

One can refuse to speak.

What would happen if everyone chose one day a year that they didn't say anything? Each person would take a different day. I hope people would, instead of speaking, listen to what was happening around them and be enlightened. It reminds me of the joke about the old man who got a hearing aid — one of those in-the-ear invisible ones — and when he returned to his doctor for the follow-up, the doctor asked him how his family was pleased that he could hear better.

He said, "I don't know. I haven't told them. I've been sitting around listening to what they say, and I've already changed my will twice."

I work very hard to be honest all the time. Ironically, my biggest hindrance in this aim is other people. Most people don't want to know the truth. The truth is dangerous. If someone knows that everyone around him thinks he tries to run everyone's lives, he'd be forced to change, wouldn't he? Well, I'm tired of it. I feel like just being brutally honest with everyone.

But I can't. Not all of my friends can bear the brutal truth. And I still believe that truth not spoken in love is no truth at all. It must be tempered by love. But I wonder, sometimes, if I am not being unloving toward the people I don't tell the brutal truth, those who are doing things which annoy me. And yet, I guess I don't say anything because I don't think they trust me. I don't think they'd change. They might stop speaking to me. I don't care of that. They can stop speaking to me if they want, but I don't want to waste my words. Words are powerful, and they carry weight. I don't want to hurt with my words, and I don't want to waste them.

So, I say nothing. May God have mercy on me if I am wrong to do this.

Another time I am silent is when the personal affairs of someone else are involved. I make it a practice not to discuss matters with people which I do not already know they have before been exposed, where privacy of another is involved. For example, I won't tell someone another person's email address unless I know that they at one point had that address before. In this way, I avoid speaking of private matters without consent and keep myself out of trouble with my friends. This is another moment when speaking would not be loving, so I don't speak.