Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
Welcome to the almost Valentine’s Day 2023 issue of Odd Company. We’re still getting occasional rain here, and the wind can be cold. But spring is definitely in the air. Ornamental fruit trees and brilliant yellow palo verde trees are in full bloom. I will soon have cabbages to harvest, and it’s time to start pepper seeds. Our potted Sicilian lemon tree has born so much fruit that I made a batch of lemon marmalade, and a lemon olive oil cake in a cast iron frying pan (something of an adventure, but delicious, and the pan was left beautifully seasoned). This kind of weather makes me want to take a picnic to the top of a hill and fly a kite between bites.
But…onward to the topic of this week’s newsletter. This time, as promised, I’d like to talk a little bit about apologies. I’ve been thinking about them a lot for the past few weeks — ever since a group discussion l was involved in about whether to make a public apology for something we all agreed was not our fault.
In spite of my compassion training, I have to admit I haven’t thought all that much about apologies till now. True, they are often part of the process of forgiveness. But as with most things, the devil is in the details. There are apologies, and there are apologies. Some make matters better, and some don’t. Some, in fact, make things worse. How do we know when to apologize and when not to? And if we decide to apologize, what should we say, and what should we avoid saying?
When I cast my net tonight for music that is somehow related to saying sorry, all I came up with was a handful of not-especially-great songs about love gone wrong and the accompanying hurt feelings. I threw them all back and picked this one out from my “favorite music” file. It doesn’t have anything particular to do with apologies. It’s just a beautiful piece of music. Written by the Russian composer Vladimir Martynov, it was inspired by and named for the biblical Beatitudes. This is the best performance of it I know, by the San Francisco based Kronos Quartet.
I’m no stranger to apologies. Like many kids, by the time I was ten, I had lost count of the number of times I’d apologized. Here are a few occasions that stand out. There was the time I poured a half-gallon of the neighbor’s milk down the gutter. (I told the full story of that one in a previous issue, “Spilled Milk.”) Not long after that, there was the time I joined the other kids in throwing overripe tomatoes at and into a different neighbor’s new car. Boy, I wouldn’t have wanted to be a neighbor of mine. And there was that time I joined the other kids in breaking the windows out of a shack that belonged to my grandfather. Oh, and let’s not forget the time I nearly put my sister’s eye out with a coat hanger. On each of these occasions, I was instructed to “apologize and mean it.” I learned by trial and error, with considerable parental reinforcement, the difference between an acceptable apology and an unacceptable one. “Jeez, I’m sorry already,” unacceptable. “I’m sorry I threw rotten tomatoes on the upholstered seats of your new Cadillac, and I will clean the seats for you,” acceptable.
During the group discussion I mentioned above, someone recommended a book. You know me. I got a copy and promptly read it. The book is “Sorry, Sorry, Sorry,” by Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy. Together, Ingall and McCarthy run the blog site Sorrywatch.com. It turns out there is a considerable body of literature about when and how to craft and deliver an effective apology. But this book is one of the more accessible ones, and the related blog site truly enriches the material.
Human beings have been apologizing to one another for a long, long time. Apologies (hand-in-hand with forgiveness) are among the ways in which we can help make the world a better place through healing. The authors bring up the Talmudic term, tikkun olam, which means “repairing the broken world.” (I recounted a story that goes with tikkun olam in “Burning Down the Village” last June.) When we do something that results in someone else getting hurt, we add to the brokenness of the world, and quite often the starting point for fixing the situation is an apology.
Ingall and McCarthy have created a helpful list of six steps we can use to create a good apology. They are:
Say you’re sorry. This might seem like a no-brainer, but tons of people try to get by with something along the lines of, “I regret that tomatoes were thrown.” Unacceptable. What the tomato-thrower is really saying there is that she regrets being in this situation. Who wouldn’t? We all regret having to apologize. But if we’re not saying we’re sorry, or that we apologize, using those words and directing them to someone or to a specific group of people, we’re just squirming around, trying not to take responsibility.
For what you did. For throwing gooey tomatoes on the upholstered seats of your new Cadillac. There it is, in all its glory. It isn’t pretty. In fact, it’s horribly embarrassing. I could have said, “I’m sorry I made you mad.” That’s definitely part of what I was sorry for, but it’s only the most sanitized part. I could have said that without losing much of my dignity, but it wouldn’t have been very convincing. A good apology involves eating at least a little bit of crow. And don’t use the passive voice. “Tomatoes were thrown.” As the authors note, if you can insert “by zombies” after the verb and get an understandable sentence, you’re deep in the weeds.
Show you understand why it was bad. Say something that makes it clear you realize how this affected the person you’re apologizing to. I could have said something along the lines of, “I know this is a brand new car and you spend a lot of time washing and waxing it, and what I did probably makes you feel like screaming.”
Only explain if you need to. Don’t make excuses. It’s important to remember that the apology is not about us. It’s about the person we’re apologizing to. “I only threw the tomatoes because all the other kids were doing it.” Which is roughly the same as saying, “The devil made me do it.” It doesn’t really matter why we did it, or how it makes us feel. What really matters is that we did it, and now we’re admitting it and apologizing.
Say why it won’t happen again. This step is mainly necessary when apologizing for an institutional failure like, say, the parakeet you bought came with a vocabulary of swear words. What procedures have you changed and how, to ensure that the mistake won’t be repeated? In my case, I could have said, “It won’t happen again because I don’t want to be in this much trouble ever again.”
Offer to make up for it. This is the part where I spent two hours helping the owners of the Cadillac clean up the mess. Ingall and McCarthy tell a wonderful story of a little boy who wrote the following apology to a classmate, “dear Ciara I’m sorry I chased you with a booger on my finger I put it here so you can get me back love Riley.” Fair compensation.
There are other parts to a good apology, of course. Whatever we say, it’s important to listen when the other person responds — assuming they do. Some apology experts recommend asking for forgiveness. Ingalls and McCarthy don’t agree with that one, and I’m not sure I do, either. Asking for forgiveness is asking for a big favor. When we ask for it, we’re asking the person we’ve harmed to please make us feel better. Probably best to let that sleeping dog lie, and if it ever awakens, look at it as a piece of wonderful good fortune.
But this is only a brief summary of what the authors have to say. For a much more complete set of thoughts on the subject of apologies, I highly recommend Sorry, Sorry, Sorry by Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy.
My poetry hasn’t been a good match for Odd Company lately. I keep coming up empty-handed. Maybe I’ll hit it just right next time. I’m currently reading a book about awe — fertile territory for sure! And have just come across a site that offers Critical Thinking Cards! Till then, take care.