Sometimes I’ve felt a little blue or overwhelmed by life, but to change that mood, I haven’t gone for a hike or pulled out my yoga mat. I‘ve gone to “Potentials Are Us,” otherwise known as a stationery store or a bookstore.
A sea of pens – fountain, ballpoint, felt-tip – it doesn’t matter. It’s what I can do with them. Provide future readers with my legacy to ponder. Give life to people and places that have only existed in my imagination. Become a reporter with me as the subject. This offering of stationery goods can’t be the half-aisle at the local supermarket or the skimpy selection at a big box store. I’m thinking of places like Staples and Office Depot/Office Max that have shelves groaning with potential. I’ll select that perfect pen and fill a blank notebook with wondrous ideas. That brand-new calendar will be just right to record all my obligations, dreams, and places to be! I know that I can use the Calendar, Notes, and Reminder apps on my iPhone, but that might not give me the peace that I’ve sought because I’ll see the forty-seven other apps I’ve downloaded this past year that haven’t yet been explored and have failed to organize into folder categories.
Speaking of folders makes me smile as chaos seems manageable if that pile of papers on my desk is put into manilla folders, names and categories all clearly marked on the tabs. I could write directly on the folder or purchase a variety of colored folder labels that scream out, “Here I am, never to be lost again!” I can become even more organized if I get a file organizer for my desk or, if there truly is a need for larger containment, a new metal filing cabinet (*black, grey, faux-wood, or…hmmm).
Organized and ready to go, that’s the goal. However, since I retired last year and don’t have a rigid schedule anymore, all of these stationery products are now like a pack of sports cars, idling at the starting line with no starter’s pistol in sight. Why do I have four hole-punchers in my office, three staplers (one of them electric!!), and a laminating machine? All this potential, but what to do with it?
Books hold this same appeal for me. So much is waiting in all of them, whether they are hardbacks, paperbacks, or eBooks! I can learn about an endless variety of topics. Once I gain all this knowledge, then I’ll be ready! I’ve accumulated forty-three books on writing (tips from Stein, Mailer, Bradbury, King, etc.), and just in case I decide to focus on non-fiction, I have a wealth of histories on WWII, the Civil War, technology subjects, and more. Add to the bookcases my collections of the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and Wired, and I should be fully informed very soon and ready for the next step.
My dear wife recently suggested that perhaps I needn’t study anymore. I was ready for the next step – write it down. Just write. Now. This suggestion at first seemed unrealistic because I knew only too well the depth of my ignorance on so many subjects. But then I realized that she was right.
I’ll be seventy-three years old this coming July, and I’ve read too many stories about the potential of errant meteorites falling to earth and new strains of COVID that will clearly be aiming for me. I shouldn’t leave out that trucker who is talking to his girlfriend on his smartphone, missing the stoplight across from our local Sweet Birch Cafe), and fails to notice me crossing the street with my double-shot latte and scone.
This is the time for potential to be realized. I’m now writing each day, and some of you have found my Rocky Point newsletter and seem to enjoy my scribbles (thank you!). I just have to put time into typing away on my laptop. It’s clear that there is no one magic book to read or a 3 X 5 erasable whiteboard that will make it all happen. Just me, this Substack platform, and the coming tomorrow saying that I better get a post written – NOW!