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“I'm sorry"

“Sorry!”

“Sorry to hear that"

What a weird way to start an essay huh? No formal meanings, no reference to Oxford or any dictionary and use of the word “sorry" in all sentences. That's the most I have used the word “sorry” over the last couple of months (not that I am someone who doesn’t apologize, but I don't mean it most of the time which is true for most of the people nowadays). Some researches go as far as to say that apologizing is linked to personal behavior and upbringing, but we will talk about that later.

Sorry. It’s a simple word. Out of 26 alphabets in English, it uses just 4, yet we use it to show our frustration instead of an apology. Our ‘sorry’ generally goes like “Sorry! I don't like it", instead of “Sorry, I apologize for my behavior". We don't apologize for the mistakes we made but expect others to apologize to us for the tiniest mistakes they made even if they didn’t mean to have offended us (so typical of us). Apologizing is taken as a symbol of weakness, so, instead of apologizing and feeling better we tend to keep the grudge inside us, making the person who deserves the apology angry and eventually increasing the gap between people. Apologizing helps us admit to our mistakes and mend our relationships with people, but our superior species are definitely terrible at that. We tend to show irritation at the slightest of things, let alone admitting to our mistake. If you tell a person that they gave you 20 cents less in return, they will stare at you as if you made a huge irreparable mistake. We don't like it when someone else points out our mistake, so why even bother apologizing? 

As a human, you need to have the basic etiquettes in life which not only includes loving your seniors and juniors but respecting their opinion and apologizing willingly when you make a mistake. We live only once, and we need to make the most out of it. Not only does it help us grow as a person, but it also shows that we are mature enough to admit to the fact that things went wrong, and we will try our best to not repeat it in the near future. Not only does it give us personal peace, but the person who we are apologizing to becomes happy because they deserve it. Obviously, you can live your life without saying “sorry”, “thank you” and “have a nice day", but it shows that we need to grow up and mature as a person. Our inability to say sorry ensures that some relationships never patch up, while some feuds never get resolved because of the same mistakes that keep on repeating with no apology. 

Once you are done with this article (provided that you even bothered reading till here) I just hope you apologize to all the people who are in the block list of your social media accounts. No, it doesn't mean that you are smaller than them or you admit to the mistake you might or might not have made or you lost the ego battle, it just means that you are big enough to forgive them, apologize and just move on with your life because who knows? “Kal Ho Na Ho”.