The chips stay on the table

Imagine you are given a pen and a piece of paper, and the instructions to “use them as you see fit.”

What do you do?

Do you do nothing? “Eh, I don’t need these. I have a phone I can type on and record with.” Do you? Or did you forget your phone at home? Even if you brought your phone, could you recognize the qualitative differences between the phone and the paper as mediums for self-reflection and self-expression?

Maybe there is something you can use the paper and pen for, for both it’s freedoms and it’s constraints, to get more out of yourself and leave more behind for whomever might discover it after you.

Or maybe you jump at the opportunity to use it. “I love doodling,” you think, as you uncap the pen and start festively scribbling on the page, picking spots and shapes at random. You’re expressing yourself, now! Who knows what you might create?

Or maybe you decide to use the paper as a catalog, trying to summarize your knowledge and experience in a meaningful way. You’re carefully considering the reader, who she or he might be, what they might need to know, what they might find interesting. You’re trying to carefully assemble something that they can derive some value from. Maybe you sign your name. Or maybe you don’t. Who knows if that even makes a difference. Whoever stumbles on it might not even be able to look you up. Maybe you’ll be long dead by the time anyone even picks up the pages.

Or maybe you get super creative, deciding to fold the paper up into origami, or maybe a paper plane. You’re making something real, something tangible and fun. Something that someone could use and derive value from years after you’ve left, regardless of who they are or what they care about. What a joy!

What do you do? What do you leave behind?

The point is not necessarily that there is a right or wrong answer. Maybe it’s one of the above, maybe it’s multiple choice. Maybe it’s something else entirely (you use turn the paper into kindling and burn the whole place down in a wonton act of careless destruction, for example). Who know what you’ll do. The point is that it all happens here. The waiting, the setup, the preparation, the payoff, the reflection, the fun, the destruction and the repentance. Everything plays out with the paper and the pen.

It isn’t that it doesn’t matter what you do. It will matter no matter what. The choices you make will ripple throughout eternity and echo thinly to the ends of the cosmos and back. Future historians will find you and catalog you. For better or for worse, they may curse your name or bless it, or in their enlightened way, they may say, “so it was, and so it was to be.” Who can say? There are so many future historians that it it probably pointless to try to lump them into a single group. But they will look, and they will see something. That is inevitable.

But, you’re here, now. You get all the time and the resources that you can hold on to. It’s probably more than you deserve. Or less. Who knows that, either? And who could correct it if it were wrong? You have what you have, you get what you’ve got, and you are where you are.

What will you do, knowing, for sure, that it all plays out here, in the real world. This is the forum. This is the platform. This is the medium for you to draw your message. Is it one of discovery? One of exaltation? Admonition? Love and creativity? All of the above? What are you putting out? What paper boats are you setting to sail? These few sheets are all you have to work whatever magic you can come up with. No more, no less.

What will you do?