‘Sorry’ can move mountains
IT’S hard not to have sorry on your mind this weekend, our Prime Minister having just issued a mass apology on our behalf.
It took long enough: 11 years after it was first suggested, and several decades after the incidents we’re saying sorry for occurred, when several thousand Aboriginal children were removed from their families.
I think we can all relate. Not, thankfully, to what the “stolen generations” went through, but on what a hard word it is to say.
It would be nice if all this sorry business catches on, that it isn’t just a one-dayer in Parliament House but the start of a trend where, so inspired are we all by this national sorry that we rush to implement our own smaller sorries at home, at the office, in our pasts.
Then we can all move on.
“Sorry” might masquerade as any other word but it’s far superior with the muscle to appease, heal and resolve conflicts, from cutting someone off at the lights to cutting someone’s lunch. The very same word that can facilitate social niceties can potentially heal “a blight on the nation’s soul”.
But, as Elton John crooned in 1976, “sorry seems to be the hardest word”. It rolls off the tongue when there’s no real blame or shame attached, such as “sorry I’m late”, or “sorry?” when we mishear someone, or an insincere “soooorry” as we shove past someone in the checkout queue when we don’t mean it one bit.
The sorries that catch in your throat are the ones that change lives.
I did a self-development course once where we were encouraged to contact people we may have hurt and say sorry.
The extraordinary thing about that process, apart from facing that no one is immune – we’ve all even inadvertently caused pain to another – is the absolute freedom it offers the recipient.
Years of suffering and complex misunderstandings resolved and dissolved in an instant by one word. As Sir Ronald Wilson observed in his “Bringing Them Home” report into the Stolen Generations, “an apology begins the healing process”.
But only if we mean it. I didn’t the first time I said it. It was a compulsory requirement of my First Confession at age six to come clean on your sins and say penance. I couldn’t think of anything to be sorry for so I made something up, an elaborate tale of lying to my mum which cost me three Hail Marys and an Our Father, then lived with the guilt for years for lying about lying.
To a priest. In a church.
You only had to cross your fingers behind your back to immediately cancel out any apology, so it was best to get it over with to keep the peace.
Sorry’s been given a bad name from lackadaisical overuse and abuse like when footy players publicly bandy about formal apologies for bad behaviour then do it all again – think Wayne Carey and Ben Cousins, whose sorries sounded more like sorry for being caught.
There are plenty of euphemisms for “sorry” ideal for pedestrian use: excuse me, pardon, forgive me, I regret to inform you, and so on.
The real meaning should be saved for genuine moments of significance, such as apologising to 13,000 people for a “genocidal policy”, or making amends with a loved one for causing them pain.
Remember that classic line in Love Story: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”. Well, sometimes it’s the only way to “right the wrongs of the past”.