Rule Making & Assumption Setting

When I was in the library one day, taking notes on How to Read a Book by Adler, I made a mistake in my handwriting and made the move to scribble it out with that circular motion I regularly employ. This gets me thinking, and writing:

When I messed up that word and scribbled it out back there, I flashed back to being told in school to mark out errors with a single line, which I automatically codified as a universal rule. Was it for readability? or so they could check over our mistakes? maybe even so they could review our thought processes? or to train us not to obliterate our mistakes, instead to remain calm?

I imagine the truth was probably that student handwriting was generally so difficult to read that the ban on scribbling existed for the sake of teacher's sanity. I think it's interesting, though, how our young minds would tend to hear a recommendation like that, or even a rule, and think that it applied to all of life. Watch out for wrong assumptions. It isn't only young minds that make them.

Regardless of what the teacher's intention was, I am still trying to find an underlying principle in what I have considered above, and I think it relates to some of the other things I've been reading lately. Michael and I are participating in Financial Peace University this year at our church. It is the second time we have gone through the program in going on eleven years of marriage. Anyway, in one of his books Dave Ramsey talks about the fact that successful people are people who haven't let a fear of failure stop them. When they fail they see what they can learn from the failure, and then they try again. Personally, I hate failure. Though I am a recovering perfectionist, I still veer toward not wanting to try things if I don't expect to do them well. I also prefer to avoid cleaning up the resulting mess. Truthfully it is one of the reasons my bathroom doesn't get cleaned more often.

Peter Elbow says that in writing sometimes you have to go ahead and use the wrong word before the right word will occur to you. Sometimes you have to go ahead and write the wrong paragraph before you can make your way clear to the write the better one. It's a good tip. Sometime it's hard for me to follow. At 34 years old I'm learning still not to try and obliterate my mistakes, to stay calm.