Yesterday was a long day. I was up at 7.30am, had tuition until 11.30am, met up with XB, followed by service and fellowship. It had been a long week too - planning lessons, doing lesson plans, preparing PowerPoint slides and worksheets, NUS convocation, Chem observation, Biology observation, giving tuition, and zone meeting.
It was already past 12MN. The eyelids were heavy; but I was waiting for the hair to dry (I'm not a fan of hair dryers).
At the same time, minutes earlier, I had left an offline MSN message to apologize for a slight blunder. It was just a small, trivial matter. An apology is not really a necessity; but still, the plain fact: the mistake is - after all - mine. Perhaps, I suspect, the motive behind the apology is not really to apologize per se; but more of an acknowledgment of the fault. At the bare minimal, doing so is still basic courtesy and responsibility at the very least.
The person came online and replied easily, "Ok. (Anyway) It's alright. If you didn't say (mention it), I won't even remember (have remembered)".
Grinning slightly for a moment behind the screen, I gave an online laugh (read: haha) before replying,
"I (did the) wrong, so of course (I would) remember".
The message behind is: The one who should remember is not you, but me. From your perspective, this is of not much significance. From my perspective, it is. The blunder is mine. Therefore, of course I should remember it; so as to better prevent a repeat of it. What for would I want to remember and hold others to their mistakes, anyway?
It was something natural and instinctive.; something that is spoken straight from the mind. It is something so real and genuine that it would have been what I would have - without so much of a moments' thought - said even in an one-to-one and face-to-face interaction.
I pressed the "enter" key and sent the message over. The instant I did that, a random thought just struck.
The sentence "If you didn't say, I won't even remember" was reverberating in the brain and lingering in the heart - longer than any typical sentence should.
Something just doesn't really click. Feels like I'm missing something important.
Isn't it funny, how sometimes - even probably without realizing it - we tend to be harder on ourselves than others are of us?
Sunday, 12 July 2009
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