Word Prompt – ELUL – Sari Kopitnikoff

It feels nerdy to admit this, but a few of us in high school took our note-taking very seriously.

We had our tools of the trade: notebook, inky pen, and color-coded highlighters. The most important tool, though, only came out on rare occasions.

We’d be jotting notes vigorously, trying to capture every important phrase from a fast-talking teacher, and in our haste, we’d spell a word wrong.

Or we’d get distracted for a moment and create a bullet point that didn’t belong.

Or a teacher would stop mid-sentence and say she forgot to mention something important.

Cue… the whiteout.

Whether it was the strong-smelling liquid kind or the thin, tape-like version, we’d whip it out and get the job done. We could make our mistakes disappear, as if they had never happened.

When Elul arrives and we look back over our notes from the year, we’re given the opportunity to make changes. During this season of teshuvah (and really, throughout the entire year) we can review what we’ve written and decide what needs to be corrected, what needs to be rewritten.

Somewhere in a plastic bin tucked away in storage, I still have many of my high school notebooks. The ink has faded and the content feels barely familiar, but when I see those little blotches of whiteout with corrections written above them, I’m reminded of something important:

Life is a rough draft.