Cocktail Musings: Mea Culpa

When my children were young, and I was filling their moral toolbox with all the items I thought they’d need one day in order to be good and decent human beings, I had a fairly clear idea of what it meant to ask for forgiveness. To me, the simple utterance of the words “I’m sorry” was never enough. I always stressed the notion that while the act of apologizing was a good place to start, it was impossible to undo the harm or damage that had been inflicted without asking “What can I do to fix this?” or “How can I make this better?” After all these years, I still feel the same way. When I wrote the Moral Skill Set post a few weeks ago, I became enamored with the thought of forgiveness being called an “art” because wording it as such implies that there is craft involved, and by further extension, mastery. It presents a bit of a moral conundrum though, right? In order for us to perfect any craft, we usually need lots of practice, and we certainly don’t want to spend a good bit of time hurting other people so much that we do indeed master this particular art. And yet still the idea intrigued me and left me wondering how I could elaborate on it further.
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