Happiness

Recently, just a few weeks back, I overreacted to something and treated a friend wrongly. Even after two days had passed, I did not apologize. All I could feel was indignation.

One more day passed, and though I still felt wronged, I wanted things to be normal again. I asked a friend for advice on how to make amends, and her advice was to offer a simple apology- no explanations, no justifications.

At first, I figured that this friendship mattered enough for me to apologize without meaning it. Then I realized that if I apologized without meaning it, it would demean our friendship. I tried thinking about things from her perspective. In the end, I texted her and apologized, and she accepted my apology.

What I did not admit was that I wasn't completely sorry; I knew where I'd gone wrong, but there was still a little part of me that expected her to apologize back, even though I wasn't sure she'd done anything wrong. My final decision was based on the fact that ultimately, the larger part of me felt remorse and had accepted that I'd made a mistake, even though there was still a little part of me that was disgruntled, seeking vindication.

At the end of the day, this is what I took away: If you're truly, completely sorry about a mistake you've made, not one bit of you will be looking for the other party to apologize back.

I had thought that observing the lives of people in Cambodia had helped me to gain perspective on life. I had thought that coming to terms with all my recent mistakes was helping me to learn humility. Recently I found that some of the things others did which used to irritate me, weren't affecting me anymore. I thought I'd learned to not sweat the small stuff, to not lose sight of what was important.

But now, somehow, writing and re-writing this entry, I'm not sure I know if what I'm feeling is maturity or numbness, or if the two are even mutually exclusive in the first place. Lately, I've been reading a book about offense by John Bevere. It talks about how Satan can use our feelings of resentment and hurt to separate us from others, and ultimately God as well. It reminds us that God's path for us is one where we lay down our judgmental attitudes and learn to forgive.

But as much as I try to understand, as much as I try to accept my mistakes, I still feel angry.



... And I was going to go on to wax lyrical about how this world seems to intertwine good and evil (conflate, is that the word I should be using?)- love with lust, brotherhood with deviance and indulgence. I was going to lament to myself how difficult it is to maneuver through all this moral ambiguity.

But it really is time to move on, and deal with it.