A clean slate

If you begin with a clean slate or blank slate you start fresh and with no limits and don't let previous mistakes or happenings affect you.
You, I and everyone else on this planet get to begin each day with a clean slate.

YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast

Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.



Idiom: A clean/blank slate

Have you ever wanted to forget past mistakes and begin life again with a clean slate?


If you begin with a clean slate or blank slate, you start fresh and with no limits, and don’t let previous mistakes or happenings affect you.


Are there some things you regret and would do differently if you could go back and do them again?

I’m sure you do; we all do.

Unfortunately, you will not get the chance.

In life, there are no do-overs.

There’s no rewind.

There’s no erase.

It’s a one-shot deal. 

Each day is a new dawn, so to speak.

That may sound negative and not my style, but that’s the way it goes.

But, hey, there is a bright side.

You, I and everyone else on this planet get to begin each day with a clean slate.

Of course, we can’t erase the mistakes of yesterday, but we can learn from them.

Then we can make sure we don’t repeat them.

Ha, ha, Mr. Positivity is back!

There you have it!

The great thing about life is that we can always begin again.

Every day is fresh, new and exciting.

I believe if we have a bad day, it’s 95% our fault.

Ninety-five percent because there are people in this world who are not happy until the people around them are unhappy; misery loves company.

That’s the other 5% that we cannot control.

We can only try to avoid them entirely or not let them get our goat.

The expression a clean/blank slate comes from the little blackboards or slates children used in school in the 1800s and early 1900s.

These slates were common before paper was affordable.

Each time a student made a mistake, all they had to do was erase it, and they could start again with a, yes, you got it, a clean slate.

Life was so much simpler then, and do-overs were a cinch.

Just for the record, remember there are no do-overs in life.

That said, however, each day is a new opportunity to start over on a clean slate.


Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test

This post is understandable by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11).  

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 84.  

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.