Think well, speak well, do well.

Camillus is a new saint to me. I had to go look him up. He was a gambler with a bad leg and, it seems, a bad temper, because the hospital where he went for treatment kicked him out for being quarrelsome–all this according to Franciscan Media. But once he was converted, he managed to change, and in the end he took care of plague victims. How’s that for a turnaround?

But his “think well” and “speak well,” in particular, really stuck out at me today. We’re living in a time when we’re under stresses we recognize (hello, COVID), but whose impacts upon us we don’t necessarily recognize.

I really believe a lot of the toxicity of social media right now is a sign of people driven right to the edge of what they can handle and then having one more feather put on top of them. Us, I mean. It’s me, too.

We aren’t able to tolerate some things, and other things we might be able to think critically and rationally about, we swallow wholeheartedly, because we’re just that overwhelmed. We simply don’t have the emotional bandwidth to be everything we’re called to be and everything we’re capable of being. So we see things that are wrong, and we totally lose it. We go wild with outrage instead of stopping to think, “Wait… is this clickbait, designed to manipulate my emotions by using loaded words and ignoring context that really matters in understanding the situation?”

I’m talking of social media, but of course it’s in our homes too. I’m so over my kids telling each other to shut up. The count is now 138 days that we’ve spent with way more togetherness and way less structure than we’re built for. What little tolerance they ever had for each other has long been exhausted. It’s a constant battle, trying to call them back to their best selves. Too often the same criticism applies to me.

None of the externals are changing any time soon, but maybe just being aware of it can help us be less reactive, to stop and think instead of knee-jerk reacting to things we think are totally intolerable. Because as the old adage says, what we think and say becomes what we do and who we are.