The Random Thoughts of Henry Holloway
There was once a landlady of mine - not the one with the sweety shop - who was an ideal landlady in many ways. But she had one bad failing and that was that she never seemed to be able to find anything good to say about anybody. If she couldn’t find something bad to say about a person she usually went a bit further back in their ancestry. One day I said to her, ‘I think you ought to start trying to find something good to say about people.’ I need hardly say that our mutual contract did not last very long after that.
Another dear old lady had quite the opposite habit. She always went out of her way to find something good to say about people. One day somebody said to her, ‘I believe you would find something good to say about the devil himself. “Well,” said she, ‘at any rate the devil minds his own business’.
Richard Gordon forsook the world of medicine for that of authorship and in one of his books, ‘Doctor at Sea’, he sums up his journey like this - ‘I had learned to give and take toleration . . . to appreciate that there is some goodness behind everybody.’ That is a valuable lesson to learn. Many people hide a bit of spite behind that self-righteous remark, ‘I always believe in speaking my mind’. I have heard that remark so often in my travels that I think it is high time we knew the truth about it.
There is a time and a place to speak your mind. And there is a time, when to speak your mind would hurt somebody. What gets me is this idea -‘I’ll speak my mind and I don’t care who it hurts’. There is a phrase in the Bible about ‘Speaking the truth in love.’ So now, I wonder could we start trying it out? Before you pass on that ‘tit bit’ of gossip be sure that you are telling the truth and, above all be sure that you are speaking in a kindly way so that nothing you say will hurt.
I came across a phrase in a book I was reading - ‘Dare I sell my parrot to the village gossip?’ Think that one out! We all - men included - love a little bit of gossip. What would life be like without it? But let it be kindly and friendly and warm.
There used to be a broadcast programme called ‘Educating Archie’ and one day there was a joke about selling dirt. One of the characters in the programme said, ‘Oh, I see. We’re going to sell dirt. And I know the very Sunday paper that will buy it.’ I wonder why it is that there is always such a demand for the ‘spicy’ things? It’s a good thing sometimes to spice up a meal, though it may have played havoc with the digestion. It’s a terribly dangerous thing to spice up conversation.
We really should not mind what people say, but we do. Likely enough when you hear what somebody is supposed to have said, the words were altered and perhaps exaggerated a little bit just to make them interesting and a spiteful tone was added for good measure. Let’s have done with harmful gossip. Life is hard enough as it is without any of us going out of our way to make it harder. During the war they used to say, ‘Careless talk costs lives.’ It is equally true that careless talk costs happiness and causes unnecessary hurt.
A modern translation of a verse in the Epistle of James reads, ‘The tongue can make the whole of life a blazing hell . . . if a man can control his tongue he can control every other part of his personality.
| Previous |