WRITE
That message, engraved on the side of the golf pencils that were stationed next to the public payphones at the hotel I was staying at until yesterday, couldn’t have been any simpler or more direct.
WRITE
And yet there were many factors aligned against me: Kids who wanted to go out and do things they couldn’t do at home, internet access fees of 50 cents a minute, and a finite amount of time stacked up against a seemingly infinite range of options. So those forces won out, and for several days I ignored the pencils’ directive.
WRITE
But now I’m back home, trying to get all of the wet and dirty clothes washed and put away, trying to decide where all of the items acquired on the trip should go, and trying to get back into the comfort zone that I just spent lots of money trying to get away from, if only for a few days.
WRITE
It’s the thing that I love to do, and the place where I feel most comfortable. The ideas are my own, the sentiments are clear, and the words are chosen with care and deliberation. The result might be good, and it might be awful, but it’s always mine, in the end.
WRITE
I resisted or ignored the urge to do this for far too long, choosing instead to allow thoughts and ideas to linger inside my head until something else inevitably came along to crowd them out. Decades of my life have passed by, with only my sometimes-flawed memory to keep those years alive. They may have even been the best years of my life, but I can’t yet know that for sure.
WRITE
I will heed the golf pencils’ calling, as I have been doing in this space for just over a year now. The result has been a stream of thoughts which could change the world somehow, or could amount to nothing at all. Whichever one it is, I’ll make sure that any gap in production is temporary, at most.
This was an awesome post! I enjoyed how you wrote it.
Thanks for your kind words, Rachel. I’m hoping that I actually saved one of the pencils, and will put a picture of it up if I did. All the best to you.
Rob