Wow.  Just wow.

I read that and immediately had a vision of sitting down with an eraser in hand and looking at the timeline of my last 59 years.  I realized there’s not a big enough eraser!   And as I looked, I saw that the gaps that would be left if I erased all my mistakes would leave me a ghost of who I am.  I also realized that if I erased this mistake or that one, then this other thing wouldn’t have happened later, or that, or that.  

This quote is just a powerful reminder that our mistakes don’t define us; they are stepping stones that led to the next part of the story.  Remove them and remove who we are.  So let’s just leave them alone.  In fact, lay them down beside the eraser.  

She picked up the eraser
thinking she could make it okay,
if she could just erase her mistakes,
they might just go away.

But as she swiped it across the page,
something didn’t feel right,
she saw her life start to disappear,
completely from her sight.

And as it did, the beautiful things,
began to vanish too,
she panicked, wanting to bring them back,
she didn’t know what to do.

So at last she laid the eraser down
and took a look at her story-filled life,
and realized just how often,
beauty had come from her strife.

And she realized
she couldn’t,
she wouldn’t,
and didn’t want to
change a thing.

Tracey King Rice

Written 01.08.24