Cultivating a Grateful Heart
The shortest pencil is longer than the longest memory.
I went to Mark Twain Elementary in Kirkland, WA. My mom kept a little book of highlights of those years of school, and I inherited the tome at some point along the way. My kids have enjoyed flipping through the pages and pictures of the book, seeing things I’d written and pasted and created back-in-the-day, what my little crew cut looked like, what my progress reports and report cards had to say on them.
I am grateful for that book my mom started - grateful for the little things it helps me remember all these years later. I remember the big, fatty pencils we’d use in first grade, pencils that were as long as my forearm and as big around as my thumb. I enjoyed using the wall mounted pencil sharpener and would grind that sucker down so it would fit in my hand. I may have even won over Mrs. Gerkin in 2nd grade, volunteering to sharpen all the pencils in her pencil holder that year. I wasn’t really sucking up to the teacher – I just liked grinding pencils and the smell of the sawdust.
I learned that I loved stories and writing even then. I experimented with handwriting styles and even practiced writing with a reverse (left) lean to my letters. My grandmother, a staunch democrat, thought that left leaning handwriting was wonderful. *Politics were a little different back then, but I recall the memory and it makes me giggle a bit, even today. She did confess to voting for Nixon but, after Watergate, swore she’d never, ever vote for another Republican, though I recall she liked Reagan quite a bit. (Okay – this trip down memory lane took me on a few detours…and, yes, my handwriting leans to the right again, in case you wondered:)
Back to pencils.
If you wandered out to my shop these days, you’d find the little section on a shelf where I keep my woodworking pencils. I have a fine, albeit miscellaneous looking, collection. Some of the framing pencils in my arsenal I’ve had for a long time and they’re probably no more than two inches long now, I’ve sharpened them so many times with my knife. They don’t fit well behind my ear anymore (classic pencil storage for a dude) but I keep them because they’ve been part of making things all these years.
Which leads me to the point of short pencils and the groups we inhabit in our lives - the teams we are on at work and the circles of folks we hang with in our lives. The pencil represents a tool we use to make a mark (like with woodworking) on something and it’s a tool that we use to write things out for ourselves and others. The encouragement today is simply this: make a mark and write something useful for yourself. The practical application here is to write down something for which you are grateful, something that you want to remember, something that has some virtue or meaning to you. (Yes – the pencil can be used to make a list of all the things you need to do today too.)
Cultivating a discipline of writing out meaningful things for yourself in something like a journal or idea-book or a prominently placed post-it note will shape you. Use the pencil to memorialize that which is a virtuous thing, and you’ll move more frequently and consistently in that direction.
That’s it. That’s my encouragement today - Write down something you are grateful for. Write it down literally. Use a pencil or a pen or lipstick or magic marker – but writing out a gratitude will change your attitude. Gratitude will change how you see the day today and we will live, move, breathe, work, produce, rest, enjoy, etc. with renewed freedom. Grateful people do great things!
Become great at this and we change. We won’t forget, no matter how long a memory we might think we have, the people and things for which we’re grateful. Writing it down, even if it’s with a shortened and well-worn pencil. It helps us to not get lost in the long list or stack in before us each day.
Short pencils are better than the longest memories.
Peace~
Craig
craig@r12coaching.com
(And a special nod to my dear friend, Sandy…Stand firm, dear sister. Stand firm indeed!)
