True, Necessary, Kind

 
"Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates:

At the first gate ask yourself, 'Is it true?'

At the second gate ask, 'Is it necessary?'

At the third gate ask, 'Is it kind?'"

- Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi

One of the rather unworthy and un-Christian habits that I struggle with and have struggled with over the years is the smart comment.

This is probably an outcome of a number of factors in my life. One is the fact that I am, by all accounts (including my own), a pleaser of people; I desperately, desperately want people to like me (even now, in my late 50's.  Go figure.).  The second, tied to the first, is that I find my ability to please largely based in humor:  I can turn a phrase or make a joke out of almost anything like nobody's business.  

This becomes problematic, of course, when one engages one's mouth without engaging one's brain.  I used to be awful at this; now I am tolerantly bad at it.  It is an improvement, but not much of one.

Most of the time - most of it mind you - I can manage to think about what I am going to say before I say it.  That said, sometimes my nature to turn a phrase and get the immediate laugh overpowers my need to shut my mouth and let the moment pass.

I should know better, of course.  I severely damaged one friendship with such behavior in 2014, almost to the point of breaking it.  And the number of times that comments have rung hollow in my ears after I made them is too numerous to count.   In my case, less is probably more.

I have heard the above phrase before (but never knew it was from the Poet Rumi, whose tomb in Konya we will visit in a few weeks).  But it was certainly enough to see them in their full quote.

It strikes me that this sort of metric - true, necessary, kind - is precisely the sort of thing we have lost in our modern society.  Truth has become a matter of debate; necessary is "necessary to me to be able to speak my mind"; kindness is something for which people like quotes on Instapic and The Book of Face but too often seldom put into practice.

If I "struggle" with the three items, it is most often with necessary.  Truth I can (generally) get right (I am often accurate, if not precise), and I am enough of my mother's son to know how to be kind.  But necessary?  In writing "necessary to me to be able to speak my mind" I condemn myself:  so much of what I say, especially the parts that get laughs and in theory make me more likeable, are hardly "necessary" to most discussions.

It makes me wonder:  What would it be like if I tried to apply these principles for a day?  For a week?  Could I last as long as week?

What if everything I said - if everything everyone said - was true, necessary, and king?  What kind of world would that be?  

Probably a lot quieter, I would guess. And hopefully, a lot nicer.