The great and highly quotable baseball player Yogi Berra once said, reputedly, that when you see a fork in the road you should take it. Slightly more poetically, Robert Frost waxed eloquent about two roads diverging in a good and taking the one less traveled, which later became the touchstone for a New Agey book by M. Scott Peck. As someone who has written at least a fair amount concerning the problem of false dilemmas and our need to overcome them and think of more options, there still comes a point at which decisions are necessary, and every choice made means that there are choices rejected and not chosen.

For the most part, this aspect of choice is so commonplace that we scarcely pay it any notice. We make choices all the time, where we want to go, which route we choose there, who we want to spend time with, and so on. We choose among products and services for a variety of motivations and reasons, and seldom think deeply about the grounds of our choices, even if we recognize that we are making choices at all. Nonetheless, every choice carries with it consequences, often that we may be unaware of, but no less true for all of that. At times, though, our blindness to the nature of choices carries with it consequences that need to be reflected on.

As a person, I greatly hate nagging. What makes people choose to nag and pester others is something that I do not understand hope never to understand beyond the insecurity and lack of trust that it results from. To say that it is an unprofitable way to deal with me (or most people, really) is something that is so obvious that it scarcely seems reasonable to have to mention it at all, except there are some people who presume to know me well that appear not to take a hint that nagging is counterproductive to whatever aims that they may have. As the NLT for Proverbs 27:15 reads: “A quarrelsome wife is as annoying as constant dripping on a rainy day .” The same thing, of course, could be said about nagging mothers or sisters or anyone else for that matter who takes up those dark arts.

What I find particularly offensive, though, is nagging that fails to recognize the whole picture. Oftentimes people will nag when they think they have a good solution to a particular problem that they think is simply not being given a fair hearing. The difficulty is that often people simply do not have all the facts, nor do they appear interested in acquiring important missing facts as that would contradict with their own perspective and mean that they had to stop nagging, which they love too dearly to cease. A few examples of this ought to suffice, but they demonstrate that willful ignorance plays more of a role in matters of life than we might often wish were the case.

If someone tells someone else that they do not desire communications of any kind, it is safe to assume that such a person does not desire friendly relations. However, that decision means that they accept all responsibility to resume friendly relations at which point they settle down and come to their senses and recognize their own fault in severing a friendship with someone. I personally cannot think of the last time I ever told someone that I never wanted to hear from them again, as no matter what difficulties I have with someone else, I always leave an open door for an apology when someone else wants to recognize their own fault in a matter. Closing that door would merely be petty and mean-spirited and emotionally immature, and a host of other qualities that I simply don’t wish to have.

It has been my experience. lamentably, that not all of those who take this drastic and often unmerited step are not fully aware of their own responsibility in this matter. If you don’t want someone to talk to you, you cannot them complain about that person not apologizing to you for whatever real or imagined offenses you hold a grudge about. You can’t have it both ways–either you leave communication channels open in the hope that someone will reflect upon their behavior and come to you humbly and apologetically, or you take it upon yourself to be the source of informing someone else (in a Christian and honest manner) how their behavior has made you feel. If you relent and honestly desire positive relations, then it is up to you to take the first step, because someone’s silence with regards to you may be a sign of respect that you do not recognize because you willfully misinterpret the behavior of the other person and told them not to talk to you in the first place.

This problem becomes more complicated when people take it upon themselves to nag when they do not know what they are dealing with. For example, there is at least one person in my life who nags me on a fairly frequent basis about things that this person has no idea what she is talking about. I find this to be immensely frustrating, and no matter how many times I politely provide information that she appears ignorant of, or mildly reply, there is no recognition that the nagging is constant and inappropriate. To go weeks or months in silence and to have just about every personal message contain some element of nagging about old friends or debt or having potential skin cancer checked without any kind of positive comments on and on and on is a great irritation and annoyance, especially when there is no recognition of the justice of any replies about these matters.

Again, you can’t have it both ways. If you desire the credibility to advice, you must take it upon yourself to gain an accurate understanding of the matters and situation you wish to advise about, lest you beclown yourself and reduce any influence you might have to zero. If you wish to comment on the bad, you must be equally willing to praise and provide encouragement for the good. If you wish for open and frequent communication, you must be willing to listen as well as speak. To be fair, the results of that listening may be more talk (or writing as the case may be), but it is no less true for all of that. All too often we (and I do not exempt myself from this tendency) are content in our ignorance and wish to pontificate about that which we have little or no knowledge. As is so often the case, what we say says a lot more about ourselves than it says about others, unless we have taken the time to deeply understand someone else and their way of living. Sadly, that is a rare thing in these days.