Ducks and Dark

For the most part I have recovered completely from the brain surgery and radiation. The past month or so I’ve felt my full strength finally returning and during our time in New York and Ireland I didn’t experience any of the fatigue that I had been going through before. It was wonderful! It is so nice to be able to move through a day without having to constantly stop and rest.

But there is one strange side effect that I still have to deal with. Every once in a while I say the wrong word. For example, yesterday I assigned my students to read the prefix to the Book of Mormon instead of the preface. Awhile back I told someone that “I was in the duck about the subject” when what I meant was that I was in the dark. This is annoying, but at the same time fascinating to me because the wrong word always starts with the same letter as the word I want, but usually has nothing else in common with what I mean. It has made me realize what an extraordinary thing the brain is and caused me to ponder on how it works.

This strange working of my brain has also given my whole family some good laughs. I just hope it doesn’t cause any problems like the one I read about the other day when a woman emailed to tell her friend that her mother was very ill, but that the family was praying she would recover and be back to normal.

The friend, sympathetic but in a hurry wrote back, “I hope she dies.”This devastated the woman with the sick mother. She never replied to the friend and it was months before the friend finally was able to get the woman to talk through the situation. At that point it was discovedr that there had been a typo in the email. The message the friend thought she had sent was, “I hope she does.” One little letter and yet it made all the difference in a friendship.

There is lesson in this. When we live in Truth instead of taking offense and jumping to conclusions, we give people the benefit of the doubt and let them explain.