Undoing

I was up late last night not able to sleep. The moon on a thick blanket of snow outside flooded light up the windows through the blinds. Nature is in a sense unchanging. There have been many nights like this one in the past, some I was not present to see or feel and others where I was. Last night was place of quiet, silent despair that simply could not be shared. The night would pass in time and by light of day things would be different. But as lay awake, I was thinking about the power of words to wound unintentionally - last night I was the wounded. 

Yet many times in the past, I have said things without thinking consequence and have caused pain to others. The sudden drop in the temperature of a happy conversation, the look in someone's eyes that told me that I had hurt and it would stay with them for a while. Indeed they had learned something new about me at that instant that would change our relationship just a little bit. There is no undoing that with love. In fact an act of kindness might only exacerbate the damage. So how does one undo, turn time's arrow backward and past where that mistake was made.

 And for the one that was hurt, can they rinse the emotion they attached to words that were said to them - consider the words on their own merit outside a prejudiced framework. I tried that approach with the question that was causing me all this grief and realized that it even made sense to ask that question based on some history. And that was exactly the source of my pain - the words had merely opened up wounds before they had time to heal.