REHEARSAL

There can be immense advantage in rehearsing what we want to say if a given situation arises. If we’ve been snide or have allowed some comment to pass without expressing how we felt about it, and if afterward we regret our handling of the incident, there ought to be no embarrassment about asking ourselves what we would like to have said. In retrospect, we can sometimes identify where our difficulties stemmed form; and just as it would profit countries to look at history and develop policies which would guide them when in the heat of fire, it is often extremely helpful to discover how we’ve contributed to misunderstandings that could have been avoided if we’d expressed ourselves precisely and to the point. Of course, we wouldn’t want to rehearse our every comment to someone.