Rehearsed Conversations and Short Fuses

Singing In the Shower

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I used to sing in the shower. Well, my wife might not call it singing but it used to sound good to me. There was nothing like stepping into the hot waters while belting out a few verses of “Folsom Prison Blues” or “Ring of Fire.” Sometimes, for reasons I cannot explain, I would break out the theme song from the “Beverly Hillbillies”. I really was never a fan of the show but, oddly, the theme song etched itself into my mind forever. My wife, who also never liked the show, would sometimes join me in that one. I am very sure that these duets would never be nominated for any awards and we are both thankful that nobody could hear them! However, we had fun singing about “A man named Jed, a poor mountaineer, barely keeping his family fed.”

Back in those days, I would occasionally rehearse conversations instead of singing songs. Sometimes, I was rehearsing a conversation I was either planning or expecting in the workplace. Sometimes, they were political debates I was sure would be coming. Those would be the days when my wife would call out from the other room,”Did you say something?” I would laugh, unaware that I was really talking out loud to myself in the shower. She might have actually been relieved she could not make out what I was saying. It was probably better that way.

For whatever reason, I stopped singing in the shower. I guess the joy in my soul faded or maybe my very acute memory of Johnny Cash lyrics failed me. Either way, my shower times have become just a way to get clean and wake up. I no longer feel the urge to break out into song or rehearse some anticipated conversations. These days, I don’t even sing along with the radio very often. Perhaps, I became self aware of just how bad I sounded! I apologize here and now for those that I tortured with my “singing” through the years. I do, however, occasionally still rehearse conversations in the solitude of my truck if I am on the road.

As years pile upon years (aging), I have begun to realize that little kernels of wisdom will hit me at unexpected times and in unexpected ways. I will catch something in a conversation or see something on television that strikes me in a manner that startles me. These things are not striking revelations or anything new to me but they are things that I just have not recognized in this manner before. Some of them I sure wish I had realized at an earlier point in life! One of these little “Pearls of Wisdom” I suddenly recognized was the futility of most of my rehearsed conversations. I realized that most of the conversations I had rehearsed in the shower had never even happened and, if they had, nothing had unfolded the way I had so carefully planned in my mind. As you can imagine, none of the conversations I was preparing myself for were ever the pleasant ones. Niceties don’t have to be rehearsed.

The other thing I realized about some of these rehearsed conversations was that, by dwelling on the anticipation of heated debate, I was subconsciously lighting the emotional fuses of anger and/or frustration. On the occasions when my anticipated conversations or debates did come to fruition, my fuse was already burning and my emotional response surfaced much quicker than it would have if the conversation had been allowed to flow without that anticipation. By dwelling on the expected clash, most of the time I made it worse than it had to be.

The Good Book tells us to take one day at a time, and, in retrospect, I can see the wisdom of that. We really cannot see the future much less dictate how it will unfold. Some preparation is a good thing but emotional rehearsals are, in my mind now, a waste of time and energy. I try to remind myself of that anytime I start rehearsing a conversation during my travels. I sure wish I had all of that rehearsal time back. I am sure my wife would have liked to have heard just a few more verses of a Johnny Cash song……….