The Story of the Pencil

It has 5 qualities which, if you manage to hang on to them, will make you a person who is always at peace with the world.

1: You are capable of great things, but you must never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps. We call that hand God, and He always guides us according to his will.
2: Now and then, I have to stop writing and use a sharperner. That makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterwards, he is much sharper. So you, too, must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows, because they will make you a better person.
3: The pencil always allows us to use an eraser to rub out any mistakes. This means that correcting something we did is not necessarily a bad thing, it helps keep us on the road to justice.
4: What really matters in a pencil is not the wooden exterior, but the graphite inside. So always pay attention to what is happening inside you.
5: It always leaves a mark. In just the same way, you should know that everything that you do in life will leave a mark, so try to be conscious of that in your every action.

-Paulo Coelho

Life works in intriguing ways sometimes. In Dharma class last week, when shifu asked us to name a noun that best describes ourself, I used 'pencil'. It got people curious and my reasoning was -- I am an indecisive person (pencil writes things but gets erased all the time). It probably wasn't the first thing that came to my mine but somehow that became my reply.

It is a mere chance that I should come across this excerpt again, one that I copied down from a Coelho book years ago, on a notebook that I have brought here.

At that time, I had thought that the pencil answer was a tad familiar -- and now I understand :)