White-Out
Maria Reylan M. Garcia
In order to survive and continue to thrive as a living being, I need three essentials. These are oxygen to which without I’ll be cold and blue literally, food to which absence I’ll be malnourished and eventually be swarmed by flies and my correction tape otherwise popularly known as the white-out. Yes, the white-out, taking form of both a strip of tape and ounces of fluid, it had whitened the dimmest and the messiest set of scribbles I have written. I had relied on it since high school when Trigonometry spilled the worst blots of ink and even until now, when my minimum-of-ten-pages Nursing Process have sent my spastic left hand berserk, committing jerky errors every two seconds. To whoever had conceived the brilliant idea of my white redeemer, hear my words of gratitude: You’re such a kindhearted person. You made the world a better place.
I use white-outs more frequent than I use my hairbrush. From this utter reality, one may realize how roughly careless I am when it comes to writing on paper. That may be the reason why I write my column articles directly on the computer; otherwise I might have used up all the white-out in the world. This dependence placed me into a life threatening challenge when I entered my Nursing course, since during examinations we are not allowed to have erasures of any forms: white-outs, rubber erasers even re-tracings. It may appear that on every exam that I have taken, I have already risked my very life. I turn frustrated every time I would shade the wrong selection while completely aware of the mistake, if I could just bring out my white-out and make things white—I mean right.
We learn from our mistakes. The basic idea of committing an error so that the same carelessness won’t recur again in the future has been the wall of confidence for many, has been the ray of hope for failures. But, then it came across me, what if we won’t have the
future to regain and correct our errors? We are too confident that someday we will be able to prove ourselves right. I am too confident that for every word I misspell the white out will simply be some few flicks away. Soon, I begin to disregard to battle off carelessness because I am assured that even though I spelled public schools as pubic schools, in a matter of seconds I can spare myself from foolish shame. Because I knew that wrong things can be made right, I took for granted on making the right things.
But, to err is human. We can’t escape the fact that we are imperfect, that we at times would take a detour on a no U-turn zone, that we at times would shade the wrong selection at an examination, that we at times would mutter awful remarks and impulsive prejudice that are in the end completely contrary. I honestly believe that we should not
just let this human characteristic to be the reason for why we are so. I don’t think our tendency to commit mistakes would be enough reason for us to stop trying to avoid mistakes. I don’t think our potential to commit errors would be a justifiable reason for us to confidently say, “I’ll do better next time.” I believe we must find ways to prevent making mistakes, learning from them should be the last resort.
I cannot imagine myself as a registered nurse who made a mistake on recording the vital signs of the patient or charting the wrong medications given. Lucky for me if the error was discovered before things get worse and life threatening. But, there are times, there are certain moments in our lives that mistakes aren’t part of the choices, that there is no room for error. Right now, I am guilty of still using the white-out, but somehow I have loosened my reliance. I treat every article, essay or even things-to-do list as one of my Nursing exams that as much as possible I must not make erasures, I must not make
mistakes. Besides it would be a waste of some drops of ink to rewrite and possibly some few sheets of paper too.
Mistakes indeed are present to remind us that we must do better the second time around, but mistakes must not prevent us from doing well the first time. Yet, I still am in deep gratitude to the creator of the white-out, because sometimes my tendency to misspell public to pubic can bring me to trouble.
White-outs are always available in office supplies, but the opportunities to do things right for the first time might not always be.
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