Pause Before You Reply

The beautiful thing is that no bad act can be done with awareness and pause; it can only be done in haste. Because in a pause, understanding arises, awareness comes, thought appears.

Dale Carnegie once wrote about an incident. He wrote that while giving a speech on Lincoln over the radio, he mistakenly mentioned the wrong birth date.

After that, he received many angry letters saying, “If you don’t even know Lincoln’s birth date, why are you giving speeches about him?” One woman from some village in America wrote him a very harsh letter filled with insults.

Carnegie became very angry. That very night he got up and wrote a reply. He abused her with twice the intensity. But it was already late at night, and since the servant had left, the letter could not be mailed. So he pressed it under a paperweight and kept it aside.

In the morning, while putting it in the envelope, he thought, “Let me read it once more.” But now twelve hours had passed. When he reread the woman’s letter, it no longer seemed as harsh as it had twelve hours earlier — because now he was reading it again with some distance in time. Then he read his own reply and felt, “This answer has become too harsh; I should write another one.”

He wrote a second reply, much gentler than the first. While writing, the thought came to him: “Why not wait another twelve hours and see whether it makes any difference?” Since twelve hours had already made such a difference, he tore up the first letter and kept the second one aside.

When he returned from the office in the evening and read the second letter, he felt there was still something excessive in it. He wrote a third letter. But then he thought, “What is the hurry? That woman has not demanded anything. Let me wait till tomorrow morning.” He continued this process for seven days.

The letter he finally wrote on the seventh day was completely opposite to the first one. The first letter was full of anger; the seventh was full of friendship. He mailed it.

A reply soon came from the woman. She apologized deeply, saying, “I made a great mistake. I too must have been passing through a bad moment. If you had replied with abuse, I would never have had the opportunity to ask forgiveness. I would simply have abused you again.”

And then Carnegie wrote that from that day onward he made it a rule never to reply to any letter before seven days had passed.

Do you understand what this means? It means that as time passes, your intensity, your mental madness, begins to fade, and opportunities for forgiveness increase. Otherwise, Bernard Shaw used to say that he never replied to any letter before fourteen days had passed.