Unintended consequences…

I woke up this morning feeling a little fuzzy headed after a night on the tiles. Whether it’s the morning after the night before, or just the events of the preceding evening, I’m in reflective mood. Well, they do say for every action there is an outcome, so it probably follows that if you drink lots of red wine, you will get a hangover…But what about outcomes we don’t intend? 

I sometimes think if we had sufficient information, we would be more prescient – able to predict the consequences of our actions.  But would this be a good thing?  If we knew, I mean – absolutely –  knew what would happen if we followed our hearts’ content, if we said what we really felt, if we kissed the friend we’d loved from afar, or took a job on the other side of the world…Would we still do it?  Or would all that knowing paralyse us and simply leave us wondering …‘what if’?

In the silence between our words, we litter our conversations with unspoken longing.   Often we don’t say what we mean or withhold information for fear of being made vulnerable. We may be intelligent apes, but it is not our language that give us away. When we don’t intend to reveal what we are really thinking, it is our hearts that betray us more eloquently than speech.