The words unsaid.

There’s a book that I read several times, to each of my kids and perhaps more than once before that, about a boy named Milo who took a journey into a strange and magical land by putting a token into a phantom tollbooth. He had many adventures and made a lot of friends, set imprisoned princesses free and learned that jumping to conclusions inevitably leads to swimming in the sea of knowledge.

There was a point in the story where he was about to object to something and the word “but” was on the tip of his tongue, but he closed his lips before it could escape and it remained captive, unsaid, until such time as it was needed, when he let it out and used it as fodder in a cannon that shattered the enforced stillness in a land that loved sound. Then it became a formidable weapon, that small, bitten off “but”.

There are words we choose not to say, each one of us, words that if said would be weapons in their own right, wreaking unimaginable havoc on our lives and those of the ones we love. We are not always aware of the words left unsaid, those that never even make it to the muscles of our tongues and throats. But then there are our own bitten-off objections, the tip-of-the-tongue non-utterances we choose at the last moment to keep hidden, to restrain, so that they do not wreak destruction along their trajectory.

It is not stillness here in danger of being shattered, but love and trust and loyalty.

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