It isn’t easy to apologize. When anger consumes you the last thing you ever want to do is apologize to someone. But I’ve found that it is one of the best skills a person can possess – the simple art of apology. I did this today. I wrote to someone I’d fought with on Twitter. I fight with too many people on Twitter, as it happens, but I’d had a particularly bad year and my anger management failed. The apology was the best thing I did today — maybe all week. It instantly removed everything awful I’d been thinking about whenever this person, or the incident, popped into my mind. I felt so much better afterwards I figured it had to be good therapy to practice this. In this case, my apology was the right thing to do. I found that an apology to a close friend recently also renewed our friendship. It might not have patched up all of the hurt feelings but it was a start.
There are currently three people I will probably never apologize to. I don’t think I have to apologize. Rather, they do. They never will, of course. So I have to hold onto this anger. I wonder sometimes how hard it would be to contact them and offer an apology. Each time I practice what I might say. I even envision going through this forgiveness/apology during yoga or meditation. But alas, holding onto the anger means more to me than letting it go. Funny, that.