Thankful, not sorry
Well, I'll be damned.
That's why I say "I'm sorry" too much. In business emails, to friends who see me cry, to total strangers in passing - that's why I do all of that over-apologizing.
(Shockingly, it turns out that the answer is not "because I have female body-parts"! Who would have guessed, right?)
I do it because I mean to say "thank you". I know, right?! How crazy simple! But it totally is that simple. Here, I'll explain how. Which will of course totally make it sound complex, but LOL that's how it goes. Try explaining to someone how to lift their arm in taiji; it takes all day. :)
A stranger holds a busy door for me when I have a full load of coffee, but I get jostled and splash them a bit. "Oh! I'm sorry!" I say.
In doing so, I've skipped to the end of a thought-process, when I should have responded to the person in the middle of it. I've thought, "oh, I'm grateful to you for holding the door! what a nice person. oh no! the nice person has now suffered a bad thing because they were helping me! I didn't want that to happen! I wish it hadn't!" and then I say "I'm sorry!" - as if my not liking the outcome is the thing that needs to be communicated. But it ISN'T. What SHOULD have been communicated is MY GRATITUDE.
I didn't cause the bad thing to happen. It's not my fault, though it'd be awfully nice of me, since I was involved, to help repair it if possible. Before the bad thing happened, someone did something nice for me, and I either skipped over saying thank you, or let it go in the interest of "sorry". I can clearly see this being true to some degree in almost every "sorry" that escapes my lips which is not motivated by an actual, humble, I-fucked-up urge to apologize.
(Sure, sometimes - probaby not enough times though - I also say thank you. But it's clear that "sorry" gets way too much air-time…and also, from a consciousness perspective, it's a straight-up denial, one of those resistances-to-reality that hides a seed of arrogance.)
I'm going on a verbal rampage to see how often I can replace "I'm sorry" with "Thank you" and let's see what it does, shall we?
Originally published at counterclockwise. You can comment here or there.