The story of a Pencil

This is one of the short articles by Paulo Coelho which I find very inspiring. This parable of his taken from the book ‘Like the Flowing River’  is popular among my students and it has a lesson for all of us in there though I tweaked it a bit to suit the sessions.

A boy was watching his grandmother write a letter. At one point he asks, “What are you writing, grandma?  Is it a story about me?”

His grandmother stopped writing her letter and said to her grandson, “I am writing about you, but more important than the words is the pencil I ‘m using. I hope you will be like this pencil when you grow up.”

Intrigued, the boy looked at the pencil. It didn’t seem very special. He said perplexed, ‘”But it ‘s like any other pencil I’ve ever seen! “

‘”That depends on how you look at things. It has five qualities which you need to learn. It will make you a person who is always at peace with the world and help you become a better person. Would you want to know what they are?”

At his nod, she goes on,  “Let’s move on to its first quality. You are capable of great things, but you must never forget that there is a hand guiding your own. This hand is that of GOD, parents, teachers, well-wishers, Godfather or whoever helps you grow.   He/she always guides us according to His will. Only with the help of that hand, we can even make a mark on the paper.”

She continues after a pause,  “The second quality is the fact that we have to stop writing now and then and use a sharpener.  That makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterwards, it’s much sharper. So you, too, must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows, face criticism, learn from your mistakes, face some setbacks and some failures and only then it will make you a better person.”

The boy continues to listen keenly.  The grandmother goes on: ” The third quality is that the pencil comes with an eraser. That is  to rub out any mistakes. This means that correcting something we did is not necessarily a bad thing; it helps to keep us on the right path and learn from our mistakes and more importantly move on despite making a mistake. Moving onto the fourth quality, What really matters in a pencil is not its wooden exterior, but the graphite inside. So always pay attention to what is happening inside you.”

The grandmother pauses and then says. ” finally, this pencil always leaves a mark. In just the same way, you should know that everything you do in life will leave a mark, so try to be conscious of that in your every action.”

I strongly believe as both a parent and a teacher that moral stories and its lessons stay longer when taught with subtlety.  This is one such story that remains long after we read it.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

This blog post is part of ‘Blogaberry Dazzle’
hosted by Cindy D’Silva and Noor Anand Chawla.