There is an old parable about gossip, which I will leave below:
A man went to a wise man and told him that he regretted all the bad things he had said about another man, asking him to help him somehow. (This situation is a good one, because the man had a form of regret. This is something we rarely see these days.) 😇
The wise man gave him a sack full of feathers and told him to walk through the village and let the wind carry them away.
The man did exactly that.
When he came back, the wise man told him:
“Now go and gather all the feathers back into the sack.”
“That’s impossible,” the man replied. “The wind has carried them everywhere.”
“Exactly,” said the wise man. “So it is with words.”
I have thought about this parable a lot lately, because not a week goes by without me hearing some gossip about myself or about someone else.
Most of the time, when we talk about gossip, we think about morality. About good and bad. About who is right and who is wrong. About the superficiality with which people judge other people, often knowing next to nothing about them.
But I think the real stake is a different one, and much bigger: words have consequences.
Once spoken, they are no longer ours.
We can no longer control where they end up, how many minds they pass through, how they are reinterpreted, amplified or distorted. We can no longer control what they build or what they destroy.
You can apologize.
You can regret it.
You can explain.
But you cannot gather all the feathers.
Perhaps that is why character is not only about telling the truth. It is about asking yourself whether what you are about to say is necessary. Whether it is useful. Whether it is fair. Why you feel the need to say things about another person.
In a world where information travels at the speed of light and opinions spread faster than facts, perhaps one of the most important forms of responsibility is responsibility for our own words.
Because once they are released into the world, they have a life of their own.
Of course some people upset us, and of course we may feel that this way we get a kind of justice. But it is worth asking ourselves why we cannot move on without spending so much energy on it.
I like this parable because it is not only about gossip. It is about reputation, about relationships and about each of us. After all, we all carry a sack of feathers from time to time. What matters is to be careful when we open it, if we open it at all.
Maybe it is better to make a pillow out of it and sleep peacefully with our head on it.
