Sunday, February 22, 2009

Eraser

Even the best pencils come with an Eraser. Thus telling us ‘it is ok to make mistakes’. Why else someone would have invented as eraser in the first place. And even so, making mistakes is considered to be such a taboo. A five year old banging on the table in the fit of his newfound excitements and knocking off a glass shattering it to pieces is reprimanded for his mistake. Does it really make so much of a difference, when more objectivity would slot it just in the list of mistakes. Learning is good, disciplining is better and practicing is the best, but do any of these ensure perfection?
We make mistakes at every stage of our life. Our predicament lies in that there is no eraser invented as yet to fade out these painful moments off our life, less so, remove them. We choose the wrong path, very often even the wrong relationships; we hurt people and frequently invest in wrong people and things. Unfortunately, we are expected to live carrying the burden of these mistakes all through. It would make an idiot out of us to confess our mistakes. So we hide them and at time continue with them in one desperate attempt to prove ourselves right.
Can we take a few moments and think of the day we made our first attempt to scribble legibly. An ‘A’ for the first time was almost like a crooked nose. We erased and tried again. This time it was less crooked, but still a nose. So we erased and tried again till we reached near perfection. Does this light up a bulb inside us? An appreciation of the fact that we are living each moment of our life for the first time. Every endeavor- to learn, to earn, to love, to own, to be a spouse, a parent to be responsible, each one of them , is a first time try and we can make mistakes…. We are allowed to use an eraser of wisdom, wipe out what we can and continue writing, with new confidence and without a trace of guilt…like we have enjoyed erasing our first ‘A”.

2 comments:

  1. By Vaishali
    I tried to take a giant white eraser
    to the dark side of my life.
    As I rubbed and rubbed at the history of my life,
    my lies, mistakes, and pain disappeared.
    That giant white eraser turned the color black.
    I stood for one second holding my lies, mistakes, and pain,
    all on the surface of the eraser in my hand.
    For one second I was the perfect person some people expect me to be.
    In the next second, I felt ashamed of what I had done.
    For with the black eraser straight in front of my face
    I could not find my joy,
    could not see the happiness inside of me.

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  2. This is a good one. I am too small to make any comment on the article written by a legend like you. However I simply put one fact here is that, fist we need courage to forgive ourselves [i.e. accept with no guilt that we used eraser] then only we can have courage to forgive others. And let me tell you that sometimes its really tough like winning a war, but I have seen great people doing this very easily.

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