Say what you need to say...

I wish I had said…if you could tell a person one thing, what would it be?  This is the question I posed to my FB friends yesterday.  I thought it was a really good question.  Don’t we all have that one moment where you look back and think, I should have said...?  As usual, I got the answers I expected, nothing terribly surprising or unexpected. 

The majority of us probably wish we could say something to a loved one before they pass.  That is probably the most popular response.  “I wish I had told so and so, I loved them more often.”  And generally when we do lose someone close to us we realize how vulnerable life really is and probably for a little while move on with our lives “planning” to say more to our friends and family since time is so precious.  And then as usual, we get back to “living” and time gets away from us again. 

Fortunately that is not my response to the question.  I am not at a loss for words.  Ever.  If something has rendered me speechless, there is probably a real good reason.  I was speechless last weekend when my friend Dan informed me I had a beaver problem.  My first reaction was, “who told you.”  But it was one of those situations where you had to be there and if you weren’t you missed one of the funniest things any human being has ever said to me.  My point is I usually have a comeback.  I ALWAYS have something to say.  To everyone.  Most of the time, I say too much.  Like I need a shut off valve.  Like the worst thing you can ever do is ask me my opinion of something, especially if it is personal, because I will tell you exactly what I feel.  I personally do not find this to be a problem, but it has been known to piss others off in the past.  Oh well.  Don’t ask me then.

When looking back and answering this question myself, I realized that I could conceivably only come up with one moment in the past 39 trips around the sun, that I can honestly say those words; “I wish I had said,” and you may have to sit down for this…but I am NOT going to tell you what that moment was. That moment was actually too personal.  I have opened myself up to anyone who reads this Blog, but this, this I am keeping to myself.   There are a lot of things that I wish I could have said actually, and I am positive I said as much as I could pull out of myself at the time it happened, but I definitely had one more thing to say.  Why didn’t I say it if I have no problem saying things?  Because I had allowed access to the one thing I had spent so much of my time and energy protecting…my heart.  It was impossible for me to articulate at that moment what I needed to say because what was happening had such a dramatic impact on my heart that I couldn’t speak.  Nothing has ever impacted me that much. 

I guess what is most important is that we should never feel like we should have said something.  Or that we left something unsaid.  Even if it hurts us or someone else.  That is one thing I don’t carry with me on a daily basis…the guilt of wishing I had said something to someone. 

So as John Mayer so eloquently puts it in one of his more popular songs, and interestingly it is the song played at the end of the movie The Bucket List… “Say what you need to say.”