It doesn’t matter how often you wipe the slate clean, a clean slate doesn’t guarantee that your next letter or the word on the freshly cleansed slate would be anymore beautiful than the last one you wrote. A clean slate helps as it doles out hope, it sweeps away the past for a fleeting moment, it fills you with a renewed energy. But hope, enthusiasm and excitement by itself cannot make your next word better unless you have also learned the better methods since the time you last drew that butterfly on the slate.

So often, we gravely misunderstand a fresh beginning or a new dawn. We become naive enough to assume that if we just change everything around us, everything about us would change. No it doesn’t happen that way. Key in the term “fresh beginning” is the beginning not the fresh, in a “new dawn” it’s the dawn and not the new. It’s probably about unlearning all that has brought you to the current pass and to restart the learning process from the scratch. It’s to admit that your methods that have failed you all this while needs to be forgotten and you need to start learning again. Even if there are no new methods to learn anymore, one must still learn those old methods in a new way or with a new perspective.

It is this unlearning part that we forget most of the times when we decide to start from a scratch. We change the canvas but we quickly draw up the same old lines that are still lingering in our memory, get back to the same pass where we were stuck earlier and then start wondering why even the new start didn’t work. Probably unlearning is one the most challenging tasks of life, to let go something that you have held as your firm belief, to resist the temptation of borrowing from your past ‘wisdom’, all this is not easy.

And therefore there is no point wiping the slate clean if you can’t wipe your mind clean. One without the other would just bring you back to the place from where you have tried to start afresh.