Is "Sorry" really the hardest word...?

A candle lights up… but dies…

Let’s admit it, we are highly susceptible to mistakes but it takes so much difficulty to be able to mend these faults by simply saying, “Sorry”.

A song claims that ‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word…’ is it really? Or should we say, ‘A mistake is the hardest… possession’? Well if that is the case, should it be proper to say that blaming others for mistakes is the easiest job on Earth?

On our Retreat last March 24 and 25 we had an activity called ‘Circle of Love’. It is not the ordinary type of sharing where you get to say something good about yourself or of other people, but it is the sharing where you get to accept the fact that you, human as you are, have made a mistake.

It was our task in this activity to give a candle to somebody we think we have hurt in the past moments of our life. This candle would then light the dark shadow cast upon by the hurt we caused to a person.

Yes, it is true. Candles light up dark spots but they die and fade away. They leave traces of heat in our midst but the moment they are blown out, they die quickly, unnoticed, leaving that shadow dark forever, yet in such a way, given treatment.

As much as we try to apologize to those people we have hurt, as much as we try to accept that fact that we have sinned, and as much as we try let go and forgive what has happened to us in the past, we just can’t seem to forget about everything or even a little thing at all.

A candle burns but dies. Just like how our apology lightens up the person we have hurt and disappointed, they die out soon, leaving a trace of the hurt which would be difficult to forget. We love the idea of forgiving but we veto the idea of forgetting the people that hurt us and we hate to accept the fact that we should move on now, forget about the past and move forward. There is just a certain feeling telling us to stop for a while and reflect. A feeling that helps us decide, a feeling that tells us that nothing’s over yet.

Forgiveness could be at all an end to a mistake and it could be a start of something else but it was never made to make us forget. It was made to make us realize how we faired in the past and with this we try to avoid this in the future.

As human as can be, we try to do the best things in life. We try to avoid things that could harm everything dear to us. Humans as we are, we try to be perfect besides every imperfection we carry in our skin, we try to deal with other people like performing dance with a glass crown in our heads, careful and lithe. As much as we try to do this perfectly, we are helping ourselves and other people not commit a mistake towards others.

After all, we could all say that life has its own ups and downs but at this point in time, we are to decide in what side we want our lives to fair good at, this could be done by making the greatest of the decisions and committing the less of the mistakes.