Dear Student,
It was great to have come across you on the road of life and shared part
of it with you. After this while we’ve walked together, the time has come for
us to part for you to follow your own path, so I’d like to give you something
as a form of present to take with you. By now, you know the gift I’ve chosen to
give you is a good old eraser. What you don’t know yet is why I’ve chosen to
give you an eraser, so I’ll explain. A
long time ago, one of my teachers gave me an eraser to remind me of three important lessons this simple
school supply which we learn to use so early on in our school life can teach us
for life beyond school.
Lesson #1 – Erasers allow us to correct
mistakes, and we should never forget that mistakes are correctable. Mistakes happen! It’s a bit of
a cliché, I know, but we should try to remind ourselves every time we make one
that everyone makes mistakes. We just have to erase them, and let go of the
mistake. This is easier said than done sometimes. Many times! However, we must
always strive to forgive ourselves for our own errors, forgive others for theirs
and move on. This eraser will
hopefully help you erase the ugliness of the past and help you focus on what
comes next. Of course, we must learn from the past, but we ought to try to stay
forward-focused for our own good. Soon you’ll learn that life is
always about what comes next! The beauty of a simple eraser, like the one I’ve given you, is
that – without having to rip off the entire page - it erases well enough for
you to focus on what comes next more wisely and more humbly, strengthened with
the experience of a life lesson learnt, no matter how ugly or how tough.
Lesson #2 – Erasers give us the power to
adjust, and our best work requires constant adjustments and updates. Your plans can be written
down, but they need to be written in such a way that you can easily erase them
and make new ones, again, in such a way that you can easily erase them as many
times as you need to. The world, your own circumstances and you yourself will
keep changing. So here comes yet another cliché: change is the only constant. This eraser will
help you to be more flexible and adaptable to changes, it will allow you to
erase your plans and make new ones as you go along on the road of
self-discovery and self-realization.
Lesson #3 – Write the script of your life softly and gently and use
this eraser as much as you have to! Think of an essay plan, now that we’ve done
so many! Erasers invite us to edit,
and the results of a second (or third) draft are usually better: that’s what
we’ve learnt together here at school, isn’t it? If you don’t
succeed (or succeed as completely as you hoped), the eraser will let you make
edits and try again. Erasers give us a
safety net, and remind us that the pressure is never as great as we might
think.
I could write much
more about each of these points, or add quite few, but in some way, that would
defeat my purpose, so I’ve erased several lessons I’ve learnt on the way just to
share these three the way they were
shared with me. I’ve created my own meaning, and deepened the lessons as I’ve
made them my own. Now I encourage you to do the same and I trust you can because I believe in you: never forget that, please!
You probably never
noticed that special eraser I was once given by this special teacher of mine when
I was your age, and which I’ve carried with me ever since, because perhaps I
carry too many books and stuff, out of sheer insecurity... My eraser is a bit worn out by now of so much
rubbing off the mistakes I keep making all the time and it blends in with the
rest of everything else I carry along. But I know it’s there, and you may have
noticed that I‘ve needed to use it quite a few times during the time we’ve
shared together!
My hope is that you do
the same: that you go through your own life with this eraser at hand and that
it becomes your reminder of how happy you can be as long as you are willing and
ready to use it especially you don’t feel happy. Hopefully someday, some other
person you share time and life with will benefit from these three lessons and
you will give them an eraser too.
You are Unique! Never erase that, please!!!
Your teacher 💗
Adapted from Kevin Eikeberry’s “The Five Lessons of the Eraser”
