So What If You Never Get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression?

A few nights ago, I was walking by a school building with street level windows. In one classroom, the lights were on and I could see that at the front of the room hung an enormous banner, with the phrase “YOU NEVER GET A SECOND CHANCE TO MAKE A FIRST IMPRESSION.”

It was chilling. I started thinking of all the times in life that I’ve made a less than great first (or second or third) impression. Since I’m human, there have been a few. Thankfully I’m not reminded of them by a giant banner in my living room.

I taught writing in a Boston public middle school for a semester last year, and I remember my initial impressions of my students. Those impressions were flawed. Students I thought had little interest in writing were among the ones I was most proud of five months later. I picked up a very good piece of advice from another teacher on dealing with students who had misbehaved in a previous class: “Always let students know that today is a new day. Whatever happened last class, that’s over now (assuming they have already apologized/served detention/dealt with the consequence). Let them know you still respect them and care about them; give them a chance to have a good day today.”

Now I were to hang a banner in a school classroom, I would lean more towards one that says, “TODAY IS A NEW DAY.”

Of course, there’s truth in both slogans.

If our opinions of one another were based on our very first impressions, our relationships would be rather, well, static. We change and are changed by one another. We become friends with people we were uninterested in the first time we met them. We are instantly attracted to people we later find we have nothing in common with. And just when we think we know everything about our mother, our sister, our grandparent, our spouse, they go and do something, perhaps something wonderful, that surprises us.

We are our history, and we cannot completely reinvent ourselves each day. We have to live with our past. Contrary to the movies or popular advertising, we do not become happier, more mature people simply by going to the gym, trading our contacts for glasses, and getting a new haircut. But with love, care, effort and introspection, we do grow and change; we get a new chance at the life ahead.

P.S. There was a much-discussed article by Doug Muder in this season’s UU World, about class prejudice within Unitarian Universalism. He argues that believing in “second chances” only makes sense for wealthy people. I agree that our socio-economic system makes it easier in some ways for wealthier people to recover from mistakes.

But people in all socio-economic brackets have the experience of making mistakes, suffering from them, examining them, recovering from them, and charting a new course in their life. This experience is fundamental to being human. It is why the concepts of redemption and rebirth are found in a variety of religious traditions, rather than limited to only groups in a particular strata of society.

One good example of this is a recent story in the New York Times, “From Two Broken Lives to One New Beginning.” It describes a couple from inner-city Baltimore who recovered from very serious mistakes to build a life together. This story doesn’t downplay the difficulty of overcoming poverty in this country, nor does it excuse the lack of services to help people do so. But it illustrates that people do experience redemption, and can strive for a second chance, even in dire circumstances.