As even keeled as I am, I have had moments of complete lack of discipline and restraint. There have been moments where I was quite pissed and lost my temper, moments where I have made rash decisions based upon knee jerk reactions, and made stupid statements without knowing facts. For those incidences I have paid the price of embarrassment, hurt others' feelings, and gotten into trouble that I have had to either talk my way out of, or apologize for. But here is the ironic thing: If I keep living, those things will happen again, because being human means falling into certain traps that humans often create for themselves and fall into. So even though early in my life I made more of those mistakes, as I got older there have been instances, but significantly less of them than when I was young and stupid. Now that I am older and a little less stupid, I am aware that these instances cause nothing but trouble for myself and often others, so with the backlog of what I guess I would call wisdom, I take important precautions to not jump to conclusions and choose to distance myself from certain situations to at least let some things play out, and develop, or more information to evolve before jumping into some hornet's nest of controversy.
I have many friends who are cops, and they tell me that 95% of what they do is dealing with people while handling situations. The situations that are most volatile require one to be well versed in people behavior-reading skills, gathering facts concerning the particular situation, and just good old fashioned common sense. For most of my friends who are cops, the biggest issue for a volatile situation between many parties is someone who just doesn't know when to shut up. That individual usually pours gasoline on the process, and makes the situation not only prickly for the ones involved, but also for the officers who are trying to assert themselves as authority figures on the scene. Usually that individual has to be either threatened or contained, so that the act of tamping down the heated moment, and sorting out information can proceed. It is never really easy because that individual usually has some vested interest in the situation, and wants to assert themselves also. So there then becomes the 3 factions of the ones that know the situation, the ones that are required to know, and the ones that think they know.
We are all guilty at some point in our lives of expressing ourselves in a way that is detrimental to a particular outcome, and in afterthought wish that we could have that moment back to exert better judgment. It should be obvious to us as adults that cooler heads are way more successful at problem solving situations than hot under the collar bombast, but often people just don't learn. Some people habitually insert themselves into situations that they have no business in because it either doesn't involve them, or they are not privy to certain facts that they need to be aware of. Sometimes important information takes awhile to surface concerning something, so being silent would certainly be productive to receiving information, but too many folks can't do that either. Some people cannot help the narcissistic urge to stick their chest out, and claim be the holder of knowledge that they certainly do not have, and that no one asked them to respond to.
We as individual human beings have a tendency to create an imaginary universe in which we see things not as they really are, but as we are, and no matter how realistic we believe our worldview is, there is always a slant that our personality, beliefs, and biases put upon things. It is within this prism universe that the trouble of not keeping a cool head occurs because naturally we believe that we are right, and everyone else needs to fall in line. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having convictions and beliefs, and opinions, but often people open their mouth first, and think later, and therefore getting more heated is a more dignified path of least resistance than backtracking and saying that something was a mistake. There are an infinite number of times in our lives where the best remedy for embarrassment is silence, and the best methodology for volatile situations is just taking a step back for a moment to process information, and assess the situation. The residual bad fallout of knee jerk reactions from people have done more damage in history than can fill up an encyclopedia. Whether it happens on a large scale on a world stage, or a small scale disagreement involving residents and local cops, someone has to have a cool head in order to diffuse potential problems. And in order to have a cool head, one must 1)understand the facts, 2)know just who or what they are dealing with and 3) understand what a cool head is supposed to do. And a cool head's primary objective is to not make things worse. A cool head also has to see and assess all grey areas in between, and not just a world in black and white.
Hot heads will always fail because they are observing and reacting to the emotional "Me" of the situation, where a cooler head will be more concerned about the ramifications of words and actions that concern the bigger picture of all involved. So people just need to simmer down, and take a step back if we are ever going to communicate with each other on a social personal level that we can all respect. Whenever you feel the need to open your mouth, you have to ask yourself a couple of things. "Am I infiltrating this situation to just show off, or do I really have something to offer that is productive, and thoughtful of all parties involved?" Since most of us have some sort of ego to display, the answer may be 8 times out of ten to just show off. So armed with that information, the most prudent thing to do is 3 words: Just shut up.
Even armed with this important information, I often bite my lip raw in an effort to not speak. I'm human. But I'm proud of the restraint that I have learned because it's just not worth it most times.I have learned that cooler heads prevail where hot heads fail, and just shutting up sometimes is the best thing for everyone. I just wished that there were more folks with raw lips walking around.
