I'm A Pencil

Can you appreciate a blank sheet of paper? Understand how much work, how much manpower, how many natural resources gave that paper life? When you turn a new page in your journal or sit down to write a letter, is the blank page beautiful? Do you express appreciation to the paper itself for allowing you the opportunity to give it any direction - any meaning you choose?

What if you ruin the chance? What if the right words don't come to you or the sketch doesn't look like the image in your mind's eye? What happens if you make a typo? What if the poem doesn't flow? What if the brainstorm doesn't result in a single usable idea? Have you wasted that sheet of paper? Lost its potential? Have all those trees perished for nothing, all those machines toiled in vain? I say: "No!" The right words might not be necessary... any words at all sometimes suffice. The sketch may be more beautiful than you could have ever imagined. The typo is a learning experience; it won't happen again. Today's poem becomes part of tomorrow's epic, and the brainstorm results in an idea so far ahead of its time that no one could possibly understand it now.

Each day is like that blank sheet. We scribble, we sketch, we struggle to turn the day into something meaningful... sometimes losing ourselves and our perspective in the process. The day's events become like words or lines on a page... flowing together... sometimes integrating beautifully, other times crashing violently. Then, as the evening fades, we take a step back - we survey the entire page - and we try to make sense of it. We want to assign meaning - importance! - to this page in our journal... the one we're about to turn. Sometimes we can't. And we wonder silently whether we've squandered this page - this day.

We haven't. Those sketches we drew and the words we wrote on this page in our lives will suffice. Some are more beautiful than we could have ever imagined. Mistakes become learning experiences. A few lines are added to a much longer epic, and ideas are born that will grow and bear fruit - on other pages - in days to come.

Pretty soon, the book has written itself.