Clean Slate

Source: shadesofgrace.org

 

"Before maize grew on earth, the fowl had some other form of meal." So goes a popular Yoruba (a tribe in South Western Nigeria) saying. I have caught myself wondering many times what it was the fowl ate. I’ll leave that for some historian to dig up. Like the proverbial alternate fowl meal, before the advent of the iPad and the so many tablets in the market, there was a kind of tablet. I like to think these modern devices were designed from the inspiration of THE SLATE.

Wooden thin piece, painted black, for the use of students. That’s what the slate looked like. It was used to practice sums, handwriting, drawing, whatever academic formulations a student needed. The colour of the slate said a lot about how often or not it had been used. The interesting thing is that this thin wooden piece had to be repainted periodically. The more it was written on in white or whatever colour chalk, and cleaned to start a ‘new session’, the original black colour faded. It was not unusual to see brown or grey slates.

I had a sit-down with a friend recently, and my attention was drawn to the slate again. Many times, the expression ‘clean slate’ is used, I doubt if children below twenty years old know the origin of that expression. Now, my thoughts. If I had a clean slate at the end of every term, unused, untouched, preserved in its original freshly painted black form, it attests to the fact that I did not do any work that term. Having a result swimming in red ink should not be a surprise in such a case. I learn new sums, I perfect my handwriting, I learn new words and their spelling, because I used my slate, which would need a new coat by the time the term ended. I could never end a term with a clean slate. The state of my slate says a lot about the effort I put into learning.

Our lives are slates, given to us by The Creator. He expects us to gain experience, using our slates. Teary nights, empty pockets, wounded hearts, a fall, a breakthrough, a promotion, births, deaths, separations, weddings, property acquisition, whatever the event might be that we experience, they are building blocks to make us sturdy structures. When the slate is used and the lesson is learnt, it is wiped clean and a new learning experience starts. That’s exactly how life is. You should not get comfortable in success, build on it. Your achievement today, is the foundation for someone else’s greater accomplishment tomorrow, update. Your failure today is the roadmap to avoiding a fall tomorrow, learn. Wipe your slate, open a new tab, start a new session. Do not go back to present a clean slate to your Maker.

Veterans bear marks, scars, reminders of their years of service, evidence of wars fought and won. Some scars clear off with time, some are life altering. Whatever it is, pick up from there, keep moving. Your slate was made to be dirtied, dirty it. Therein lies fulfilment.