The Single Woman’s Dash of Sass: Life Doesn’t Come With an Eraser – & Here’s WHY!

Quote of the Day:

“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” ~John Gardner

The Single Woman Says:

It struck me as I was walking on the beach last week how many different kinds of ways there are to erase things in life. You can clean your hard drive…wipe your cell phone…delete your Facebook page…use white-out on mistakes…recall unread emails you sent in a cloud of emotion and bad judgment…even the beach itself finds a way to autocorrect itself after a long day of kids playing in it and adults laying on it. High-tide comes in and poof! Sandcastles and footprints and even items left behind suddenly find themselves swept out to shore. Yes, almost everything in life can be erased.

Except for life itself.

Think about it. If we were pencils, with erasers firmly planted at the tops of our heads, we could say something stupid and like magic, flip ourselves upside down and erase the words right out of thin air. If we initiated a break-up only to wake up the next day and regret it, we could recall our moment of snap judgment and the past 12 hours and be right back “In a Relationship.” And if we made some horrible, foolish, unthinkable mistake that set our feet on a path we hadn’t planned for, we could simply delete the mistake and be back to a clean slate. But while life offers many methods of erasing our many infractions…it doesn’t have a method for erasing itself. Why is that?

I personally think it’s God’s way of encouraging us to live BIG…to take chances…to risk being nothing in order to be everything…to embrace life and its many fragilities and uncertainties with wide open arms…and to dare to step out on a limb with no idea if it can hold our weight. To do…to play…to see…to be…to laugh…to LEAP.

No, I don’t think life was meant to have an eraser. I think, much like enthusiastic kids, we’re meant to boldly fingerpaint on the canvass of life with no thought of how perfect the finished product might be. Because Life isn’t meant to be lived perfectly…but merely to be LIVED. Boldly, wildly, beautifully, uncertainly, tragically, magically LIVED.