I love the old Jackie Gleason show – The Honeymooners.
In one of the episodes, Ralph Kramden errantly believes that he’s been fired from his bus driver job. He writes a letter to his boss:
Dear Mr. Marshall
You dirty bum! You’re nothing but a miserable low-life. You ought to turn in your membership card in the human race, after firing me after nine years of loyal service. I can truthfully say that you are the meanest man in the world. You dirty….
Respectfully yours, etc., etc., etc.
Later, Ralph learned that he wasn’t fired. He’d been promoted. Too late – he couldn’t take it back. I won’t spoil the rest of the story. The point is that words cannot be re-collected when they’ve been penned and mailed. And they cannot be re-collected when they’ve been spoken.
In the audio message below, we see the real importance of guarding our words.
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Some years ago a group of friends and I were sitting around, talking, and one said to our friend, Aaron, “Wow, you don’t say much.” He thought a moment and said, “When I was younger I realized I said a lot of really dumb things. So, I decided to not say anything unless I really had something to contribute.”
While I still tend to say really dumb things, I try to think of Aaron…who, I think, realized the value of guarding his tongue.