From Ted
I was sitting in the immaculate office of a friend of mine talking with her, when I happened to glance down and noticed a neat row of pens on her very orderly desk. There was something not quite right about them though and I looked again. They weren’t pens, they were mechanical pencils! With erasers on the end!! That had been used!!! Not one pen to be seen anywhere on her desk.
I asked her what was up with the pencils and she explained that the older and more experienced she gets, the less she knows for certain and the more her life is done in pencil.
What made this so ironic a moment was that for the last few years I have been using, almost exclusively, you guessed it, mechanical pencils, for exactly the same reason. Until that moment, I didn’t know anyone else had been having that experience as well.
I don’t think she had either, judging by the energy unleashed as we excitedly told each other of the things in our life that had taught us this “The older I get, the less I am absolutely certain about anything, so rather than be disappointed let’s do life by pencil” lesson.
I was listening to another colleague a few weeks later and she were talking about how as she was getting older, she noticed how much more certain of everything she was becoming. The war in Iraq. Where the economy was going. What life had in store for her. Certain about everything. I have found that this kind of certainty is very common in people my age. That’s one of the reasons I hid the fact that I was doing life in pencil these days.
Since she knew I was about her age, she asked me if I wasn’t finding that to be true also. After a long pause, I told her that I was finding out the exact opposite. I told her about my movement from pens to pencils and how that seemed to be what I was most certain of. She looked at me a bit puzzled as if evaluating our relationship (the way someone might when they just noticed that you have a third eye on your face), and promptly changed the subject. My experience with people my age is that there are more like her than there are like me regarding the “pencil-ness” of life. I have been around people who as they aged became more and more dogmatic about what is good. What is the absolute truth. What should happen. Who should do it. What is right. What is wrong.
There is a part of me that wishes for that certainty. It would make things a lot easier. It is scary sometimes to live in the “I don’t really know” place when others around seem so certain. But not a very big part. There is a much larger part of me that wants to keep opening up to new truths, new challenges to my old beliefs, to new ways of seeing the world, especially from the young souls my life is gifted with. See, when I have something written down in pencil and it doesn’t end up happening, I simply erase what I thought was going to happen and, Wallah, a space opens up for what is. No need to hang on to anything. No need to waste precious time arguing about what was supposed to happen. No need to waste energy resisting what has already happened.
So, just as it has been called a miracle that water was turned into wine, I consider it a miracle that I have been converted from pens into pencils. I’m grateful. The only problem is that I can never remember where I put the dang thing!!!!
