I am not sorry!

Have you ever noticed how often the phrase, "I'm sorry" is used in everyday conversations?

I am currently working my way out of the, "I'm sorry" rut. Last fall I was working on a project in an entry way, and every time someone would pass through and say, "excuse me," my immediate response was, "oh, I'm sorry". After about my 100th apology, a man stopped and explained I had absolutely nothing to be sorry for, and furthermore, I needed to quit apologizing. (His explanation was much more eloquent and life changing, but I'm paraphrasing here.) The rest of that particular evening and on throughout the continuation of the project, I had to make a conscious effort not to apologize; not because I was attempting to appease someone, but because the light bulb finally clicked in my head that my life is not one giant inconvenience to humanity and I shouldn't have to make amends for breathing fresh air.

Why are excessive "I'm sorries" such a big deal? After all, I can think of at least ten other phrases that are at least a hundred times worse (Go ahead and do the math on that one!) For starters, when "I'm sorry" becomes as frequent and familiar as brushing one's teeth or fixing one's hair, it voids an actual and necessary apology of any value. Secondly, it can keep the apologetic in a place of guilt and fighting a constant battle of self-worth; nobody wants to live there.

Fast forward five or six months and I still haven't got a complete handle on the issue at hand, but I'm making some serious headway. Once I started being aware of my own issue, I realized it's an epidemic for others as well. Like me, some people apologize for the most absurd, out of anyone's control type of things, to which I respond with my little nugget of new-found insight. I can't say I'm chaning the world, but it's reasonable to think (and hope) that someone somewhere will benefit.