Like most English people, I’m excellent at saying sorry. Sorry is almost never the hardest word. It’s a piece of cake.
I can do the unnecessary sorry when no-one is upset. I can do the polite sorry that suggests someone else’s fault is my own. I can do the ridiculous sorry which means that something appalling has happened to me but I still feel the urgent need to apologise.
The thing about saying sorry is that I do it all the time – except when I actually should – when I’ve hurt someone, or when I’ve messed up either by doing something properly wrong or by not doing something right.
It’s on my mind now because last week I had my annual review meeting at work and I found myself remembering with a cold shudder all the people I’d let down over the course of the last year, usually by promising something I could never deliver, or by not doing simple things that would have made everyone’s days easier.
These were not great sins, but an accumulation of little things, habits of life – and the problem is that they are too numerous and often too far in the past to go back and say sorry for. But they still stick in my mind and gnaw at me a little every day.
So it’s worth remembering a story in John’s Gospel in the Bible, when Jesus was confronted by an angry mob, who wanted him to condemn a woman they regarded as sinful. Now the question wasn’t whether the woman had done something wrong – it seems that she had – but what Jesus thought she should do in response. Jesus didn’t demand an apology to try to satisfy her accusers. He simply told her to go, and not do it again.
The key then, perhaps, is not how effusively or publicly we apologise, but how committed we are to doing things differently in the future. In other words, I reckon that if I’m going to start making things right, it isn’t about what I say – it’s about how I change my behaviour. And that means at work, at home, in my family, among my friends and every day with my colleagues.
Now that is a lot harder than saying sorry. But in the long run, it’s a lot more effective.
Before I read this Pause, Chris asked about my work and we talked about how museum objects are ‘agile’ as resources for teaching. So that was nice.
The image above is a detail from Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (oil on panel, 1565), now at the Courtauld Gallery. There is a wonderful piece of writing about the painting, by Iain Sinclair, published in the Guardian. Read it here.