Ten Ways to Approach a New Year #6

As a Blank Slate

We don't know much about slate in our modern society, but word has it that students used to use "Blue Books" for final exams and teachers, in the primeval world, often wrote on chalk boards. A new year, though not completely a tabula rasa, affords us an opportunity to take a fresh test on a blank slate. We may be carrying luggage from past lives, but we can certainly shed some of the weight and pick up a fresh pen and write our own Blue Book essay come January.

It's only natural. Trees and flowers and fields begin to rewrite their own stories in the Spring, the world turns, and suddenly the world as we know it is erasing past sub plots and characters and scribbling in new directions and personalities. The beginning of a New Year, perhaps, affords us these same affects and offers us a surprising word count in which to resubmit another chapter of our lives.

So . . . there are outlines to be written, chapter headings to create, major personalities to understand and develop. Some of these belong to us.

There's a Blue Book waiting for us in 2011, a freshly-erased blackboard free of dust. Some may choose to create anew. Others will copy the work of others or simply trace over the vestiges of a past life, unchanged and unwilling. But there's something inspiring about a blank slate, isn't there?