Writing with your Path

"I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world." - Mother Teresa

I'm not sure how to attribute this cartoon; I've seen it a few places:



The bottom one looks like a recording of a heartbeat. In comparison, the top one looks like the flatline that means death. The top image is boring. The bottom reminds me of the ups and downs of handwriting. Something with personality. A path much more interesting to write, read, and live.

Applied to a sheet of paper to write a story, a pencil might wonder, "why all the back and forth?" not realizing that that is how letters are formed. It would probably feel very jerky and awkward: "Do you even know what you're doing, writer? Why am I being bumped around so much? Can we make this any smoother?" Even in the smoothest cursive, a writer must cross t's and dot i's. Maybe letters are the repeated rituals of our days. Sipping water. Checking a phone. Driving to work. Walking from room to room. Cooking. Eating. Laundry. More cooking. It takes a lot of repeated occurrences of these to make a life, to make a story. It wouldn't be a very long or interesting story if no letter could be reused.

Maybe that left edge of the paper is our fresh start every morning. We are progressing, even when all the early mornings begin to blend and feel the same. Even when we seem to stand still or go backwards, it's always a new starting point; regression isn't possible. Jerky movements are par for the course, not a sign of trouble. Sudden, uncomfortable detours are exactly where they belong, making t's and i's, f's and j's. Life wouldn't make sense without them.

Are we more like pens than pencils? Our actions are indelible. Either way, there's a limit to how much we will write with our lives. Whether by ink or wood, the remainder of our lives shrinks daily, little by little. We are dulled by regular life until something painful occurs that sharpens us once again to press into the paper more. Either way, the writing instrument can't be aware of the full story on its own. It's bumped and jostled around, moving too fast to get a clear picture of its surroundings. A higher perspective is needed to see that something is coming together, even if we're only able to fathom our paragraph in a book too large to comprehend.