Begin Again

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What if you get two live a day twice? What if you woke up to the same day again? I don’t mean the same day as in the regular happenings, the chirping of the birds, the rising of the Sun and the rustling of the tree branches. No, I mean the same day, as in the same incidents, the same events and situations. You get to relive a day. It would be wonderful, wouldn’t it, if you were able to do that? You would correct all the mistakes you made, making sure to make full use of this coveted second chance, to not fight with your best friend over the last Tiffany bracelet, to not tell your sister off for using your shampoo and end up cat fighting, later regretting all you did, not forgetting to submit the AP Psychology paper, you had worked really hard over. You wouldn’t ever repeat those mistakes. But you wouldn’t change what you did earlier either. Your friend would forever remember that fight and so would your sister, those stinging words and those cold looks.  Those would stay imprinted in their mind forever. If you hammer a nail into a plank of wood and then yank it out, the nail is removed, but the gaping hole remains. Second chances are not about erasing the past, or erasing the mistakes, because that is impossible, that can’t be done. Life is written in permanent ink and anything that happens cannot be rubbed of. Second chances are about learning from the mistakes and moving on. There is no such thing as a clean slate, your past will remain your past. But you can take lessons from it to build a better future which would ultimately overshadow the past, so people don’t remember you for the mistakes you made once, but how you evolved to be a better person. That, indeed, is the closest one could get to a clean slate, a new start.

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