“I took away their erasers,” she said.
They were fixated on perfection and they never made any progress.
The high school art teacher was sharing how her drawing students were afraid of making mistakes. If they made a bad mark on the paper, they would erase it and start again. Another mistake, and more erasing.
The thing is, if you erase too many times, you actually damage the paper. You destroy the surface and it no longer takes a mark in the way it should.
“Build on it,” she said.
If it doesn’t look right, add something else. If your mark is ugly, make another until it becomes something beautiful.
Life is like that.
We make ugly marks. Things don’t turn out the way we had imagined.
But we can’t erase those mistakes. All we can do is move forward.
Continue to make new marks around those troubled spots and try to learn from what we have done before.
Recognize what has gone wrong, examine where you are, and keep building.
You might find that you create beauty you didn’t expect.
There is good wisdom here – I’m thinking about how to apply it in our democracy as well as personally. Thank you!
Such a clear message- I love it.
Such a true message