Word Power - Power of Understanding How You Communicate

It was a simple rule and we were required to live by it throughout our formative years. Our family household rule was to think before we spoke and to consider before we expressed, because words were things and words, once delivered, could never be taken back.

The lesson that taught us was priceless, on the one hand, because we were constantly in touch with our own emotions and constantly seeking to be aware of the emotional vulnerability of others we were interacting with, but it also had a downside in that it caused us to assume our rule was the rule the world around us operated under.

It did not take us long, once we ventured into the universe about us, to come to understand our household rule was the exception, and by no means the norm.

As an adult, years after the formation of my thinking, I am forced to take a closer look at it in the light of life's practical application as opposed to its theory. I think of the consideration of words before they were spoken in retrospect to the major events in my own life and wonder how some of those events may have turned out, for the better or the worst, had I spoken first and thought later.

I also look at the unfolding of circumstances, the successes, and the failures of others with whom those rules were shared and I am forced both to smile and to weep knowing the role their formation, like my own, played in the quality and quantity of their existences. Belatedly, I understand, more now than ever, the suggestion that rules are meant to be broken, and if not broken, at least amended.

But what is the alternative to considered expression? At close hand, I have observed the opposite teaching.

Through a host of personal relationships in classrooms, workplaces, within friendships and romances, in the roles of parenting or community service or day to day interaction with fellowman, I have experienced or witnessed the so often caustic impact of corrosive words delivered without forethought or consideration.