Silence

Someone told me recently that sometimes "restraint of pen and tongue" works.

Yes. When you keep your mouth shut, you win. Temporarily. You can't say the wrong thing, you can't screw up. In fact, by remaining silent you can frustrate the object of your silence, causing them to anger, over-react and say stupidities, automatically putting them at a disadvantage. You render them helpless with your silence.

When i'm being ignored I feel as though i'm swinging at the air, like a tiny doll held up by her shirt collar, between the monstrous thumb and forefinger of some terrible, stubbornly indifferent beast, kicking and screaming at silence, at the air, at nothing. Futile, fruitless.

But, in the words of Miguel de Unamuno, a spanish poet: "At times to be silent is to lie." Unamuno argues that this is because when you keep your mouth shut, for though you might win through sheer "brute force" you will not "...convince, for to convince you need to persuade and to persuade you need what you lack: Reason and Right."

So maybe, in the end, silence is not best. Because you don't have excuse. You are, in the general view-- wrong because you have said nothing that justifies your silence. In the end, the victory falls with the ignored, the little girl punching at nothing, frantically throwing herself out there, again and again, hoping to strike something, to feel a resistance, to feel the pain in her feet and knuckles... to bleed a little. To elicit response. To be heard.

Because you hear her, don't you? And for whatever reason, you can't turn your eyes away. You can't close your ears. You can only remain mute and stoic and hope she'll just shut up.

But she won't.

So, say something! Give a reason. Convince her. If you think she's wrong, tell her. Tell her why. Because if you don't she'll win TKO, and you will have lost honor, and more importantly... you will have lost her.