How then like the autumn leaves in their amazing and elegiac beauty can we stay loving to matters in life that are fleeting as we artfully let go? The Jewish rite relates to the process of forgiveness as an act of teshuvah, or, a returning. A return to what, you may ask? It is about returning to a clean slate of understanding and trust to things between people, and more deeply returning your own heart to that state of approach upon which we are when we first came into this world, meaning open, beautifully vulnerable in our sweet humanity, receptive, and ready to do good.

There is an interesting contradiction to each and every one of us though because in our humanness we are also born to err. Everyone makes mistakes. If you look at the great heroes and leaders of a day or reference Bible stories, you glean that people—some really great people — made many mistakes, large and small. The difference is that they chose to learn and grow from them. What makes someone great then is not that they lead a perfect life but how they teach themselves to improve and refine their hearts for the better through an imperfect one.

The instruction in such stories at a deeper level, also, is that we all have work to do. The endpoint is not that we accept our flaws assuming we do nothing with them. To say that my flaws are okay and that your flaws are okay and that everyone makes mistakes so they are okay is just plain wrong. Else, there will be no peace in this world. Peace only comes through what you and I heal. No one wants to hear you have work to do. But we all do.

Sadly, we live in a culture that makes apologizing shameful. Yet shame is incongruous with the truth that we have all been born to err. When we become inured to make ourselves open to the fact that we err, we get in our own way. But wouldn’t it be really nice if we each chose to not get in the way of our own humanity?

Imagine what a more wonderful world we would all live in if we did not obfuscate or delude what is our responsibility to fix for ourselves. Healthy vulnerability says I am still a good person and at the same time I acknowledge I may have used bad judgment that needs correcting. Apologizing is actually a forward motion. Done well, it lets us make a commitment to correct things on an important metaphysical level and love yourself more. When we don’t apologize, we only risk hurting not just ourselves and others but future cycles of interrelations and future generations as well.

A bike can’t go unless you sit on board and use your own muscles to pedal and fire your brain in a specific way to turn the wheel and direct it. Most of us have parked away our childhood bicycles. To apologize well is like those early rides of applied work past a fearful and often clumsy sensation and transforming the unconnected pieces into a new place of having set yourself free. A bicycle carries gracefully when we are in for the ride sincerely and without any unencumbered agenda tacked on. The same goes for how we apologize. Most of us trip our own bike so to speak because we don’t make one at all or because when we do we do not do it sincerely. We tend not to say sorry or feel sorry because we don’t see the other person as an equal and we tend not to because we confuse love for shame when we ask our own hearts to be found.

The Jewish view as well as the many Zen traditions use mistakes to grow forward — for we all know how an insincere I’m sorry never works. We hear it and we feel empty, giver and receiver, at both sides. It doesn’t matter our age or the color in our heart. Curiously, guilt is not a Jewish idea. Surprise! Guilt is paralyzing and self-absorbing. It is a state that fills the heart with negativity and self-loathing. This state then infects others whom we care for and love. Remorse, on the other hand, is good. It lets us know we have alienated ourselves from our deeper roots and of having abandoned our own inner selves. Remorse can include a sense of anguish or feeling lost or trapped or despaired. It lets you let go of the shame and embarrassment and negativity you carry and repair and move on for better.

Jewish and Zen traditions neither encourages depression to such matters of human weakness either. The reasoning is that depression often consumes you away from the tremendous energy necessary for introspection and honest self-improvement. Prolonged sadness is not healthy for the mind, the body or connected generations either. So when you ask for forgiveness, it should be done with a sense of remorse joined to a humble joy that you are elevating your heart to a more beautiful connection with others and within yourself.

For if we said to another, “I’m sorry for what I did and I wish I did better and I am going to work on doing just that now by becoming more conscientious and catching myself now” imagine how much pain and unnecessary conflict could free. And when we embark on such a personal path, we imbibe on a hugely empowering level that the choices we make in life do not own us but that we own them.