"Hold your words when you are angry because sometimes words spoken in anger leave a scar that can never be healed." ~Anonymous
There once was a little boy with a bad temper. His father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he should hammer a nail in the back fence rather than take it out on other people.
On the first day, the boy drove 37 nails into the fence. As the days went by, though, the number of nails gradually dwindled down. He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence.
Finally the day came when the boy didn't lose his temper at all. He told his father about it, and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper. The days passed, and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone. The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence.
He said, "You have done well, my son, and I'm very proud of you. But look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same. Remember that when you say things in anger, your words leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out, and it won't matter how many times you say 'I'm sorry'—the wound is still there. A verbal wound is as bad as a physical one."
I discovered this story at Living Life Fully and would like to express my thanks to Tom Walsh, the owner of the site. The author of the parable is unknown.
It certainly is a very good parable. I just noted that I have posted 97 stories. Three or four of them were like this one, something that someone else had written and I thought was worth sharing. In fact, one of those, titled, "Milk," has been the most viewed.
This is a book to help readers plow through the enormous overload of the 95% nonsense to find the 5% common sense that is hidden away, which is needed to sustain long-term success in solving today's problems.
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There once was a little boy with a bad temper. His father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he should hammer a nail in the back fence rather than take it out on other people.
