Back in my junior high years, there was a program called ZAP which means “zeros aren’t permitted”. When the program was first introduced, the school showed a video. This video gave off the impression to a, at the time, a 12-year-old girl that if you got any zeros in school that you would go to prison.
This terrified me. I have never been a good student and I thought that something so little as a zero on an assignment meaning that I would go to prison was just something that was too realistic for me.
Thankfully, going to prison over a zero was not a thing but back then I got many of them. If I felt I was doing well in a class and an assignment wouldn’t have that big of an effect on my grade, I wouldn’t do it. I was prone to procrastinating and prone to not putting in the effort to make anything look good.
Many teachers at that time gave me more second chances to complete homework then I probably deserved, mostly due to my mother asking if I could redo an assignment.
Imagine what would have happened if I never had received those second chances, if second chances never existed anywhere.
I once heard this story of a woman who would drink and do drugs in her hometown. People only thought of her as that type of person. A person that kids should stay away from and people treated her rudely.
As she grew up, she changed. She left her hometown and decided to give up drugs and drink less. This woman transformed her whole life almost like she had a second chance to make life better. When she decided to move back to her hometown, people still treated her the exact same as when she was there before. They treated her like she was worthless and never saw the change that she had made to make her life better.
Faster than she had changed for the better, she slipped back into her old ways. The better life becoming a memory and the old one reappearing out of the ignorance of the people who had known her before.
Second chances didn’t exist for this woman in the town. She was who she was and would always be the same person.
That didn’t make sense to me when I heard it. People change all the time. This past year alone I have changed more than I ever thought I would.
I became more confident as a person, took steps to help my mental health, and planned accordingly to finish assignments and not procrastinate them.
If you looked back at where I was as a person when I was nine to the person I am as a young adult, you would see very clearly that I am not the same as I was then.
So why did these townspeople not accept the change of this woman? I personally don’t know this answer but I do know that change is first and foremostly for us.
When we change for ourselves, we do it because we want to become a better person. To become one who will become fit, one who will become for faithful, and one who will take adventures as they come.
I watched a video recently about New Year’s resolutions. She said that what she does for these resolutions is she writes down the type of person she wants to become in different sections: emotional, intellectual, spiritual, mental, physical, artistic, and financial.
For each of these sections, she would write the ideal person in each of those categories like for intellectual she learns two new skills and reads 70 books a year. She does this for each category and pays attention to what overlaps. For example, exercise helps both physical and mental, therapy helps both mental and emotional, and yoga helps both physical and mental. She then sees where she is lacking in each of these sections and tries to improve herself to become better.
When she accidentally fails one of these resolutions, she just picks herself back up and tries again to become this better person, and that’s what New Year’s resolutions and second chances are all about.
It is about picking yourself back up from the ground and becoming better. Changing yourself is hard, but focusing on how you think of yourself and becoming a better person no matter how hard will make you a better person.
I may not know what would happen if I didn’t get my own second chances, and I might not know if that woman tried again to be better, but I do know that I am in control of my own future and when I focus on changing myself to become better, I will become better.
