APOLOGIES AND OTHER STRANGERS

Throughout this entire Coronavirus quarantine, many things about myself have transpired. One of which is something I’ve began doing I haven’t doing in forever: stopped and…well…just stopped. Stopping is a really awesome thing, especially for someone like myself who only go, go, goes. I’ve learned to stop, reflect, and meditate on all those really cool things in order to keep ourselves intact.

Ever heard of when people get a “pedi?” This means, of course, a “pedicure.” In this case, there’s a term I like to use called a “medi”, which stands for “meditation and deep thought.”  During my “medi-moment,” something out of the blue occurred to me. It’s something so simple but I don’t think I ever entirely grasped this concept: “Not everyone’s going to apologize to us—ever and sometimes that’s ok.” 

As humans, when someone does something wrong to us we not only want an apology, but we often seek out some sort of emotional restitution, in the end driving us to becoming obsessive and causing the need for unbridled vengeance. We won’t admit that sometimes for a variety of reasons: we’re too Christian for that, “when they go low, we go high,” etc.

Also as human beings, we want the villain to suffer. That’s why we get such gratification out of the bad guy or girl getting blown up or pushed off a balcony in a movie or TV show. It’s gratification in its highest regard, whether we admit it or not. Don’t get me wrong. We’re not bad people and we don’t want anyone to die. We just want “wrongs to be righted” and bad people to learn their lessons. That’s good if you live behind the silver screen, but in the real world that’s not how it always works. I’ve seen two kinds of people: those who go to their graves never admitting wrong and those who never got their much-deserved apology.

It happens, but there’s one thing that makes it OK. When we finally learn that in some cases we’re never going to get an apology. Some of us have spent our whole lives under the pressure of needing an apology that’s never going to happen, and we need to be OK if it never happens. Why? Because waiting for an apology is like being in a rut, and a rut is a grave with no end, leaving us physically drained and emotionally exhausted.

Am I saying we shouldn’t forget? Of course not! However, the one thing I have learned is if we spend so much of our time and energy obsessively waiting for an apology that will never come, we end up keeping ourselves from finally being free and living our best life possible.