OOld Age Day by Day June 15, 2010

One of the many issues I work on in my Buddhist practice is Right Speech. That one had my name on it from the get-go. I was raised in a contentious family with arguments over politics at dinner and sarcasm about everything. I developed a devastating tongue, and hurt many people before I recognized, in my later teen years, how harmful I was being. I began to notice that my father's sharp tongue, and my brother's and my baby stilettos left my mother as the victim of any verbal exchange. I didn't realize then that she'd only been in school until third grade, and she was in a huge Baptist family that worked so hard there was no time for repartee. My father's mother was educated and a teacher, and from her he got the mouth that lashed out unconsciously. Everything was adversarial and a conflict. There were winners and losers. The worst thing my Dad would say about someone is they were a Loser.

I didn't want to be a loser. But I also began to notice that winning a verbal argument didn't make me feel any better, it made me feel worse. I began the long task of taming my tongue. Now, when something slips out, it is a big shock to me. On Saturday, I said something about a person in front of some friends, and it is haunting me. There is a Jiminy Cricket after all. All that nastiness is still stuffed in a corner of the messy room I call my brain, and I once told my teacher I was most afraid of having a stroke like my father's mother, and ending up spewing nasty words until death. What a sad ending for her, and since we cannot know our manner of dying, I am often dusting my room, throwing out the junk, packing up my language in boxes and marking it trash.

I enjoy silence now, and pause before speaking in the phone. I wait a day when I can to answer email. Let my better self, my mother's voice, have a chance to speak. Ironically, as my mother got older, and drank too much, she was capable of intense cruel speech, and some of her words echo for me when I'm in the mood to berate myself. We all have this capacity to wound and it takes an active holding back sometimes to change our habits and think first and speak later or not at all. If I don't want silence, I sing, and singing lifts my heart and reminds me of the way I want to live. From the spirit not the dark.