Every time you sharpen a pencil, it gets a little smaller. Its wood shavings curl away, its length shortens, and one day it’s too tiny to hold. At first glance, it feels like loss. The pencil is disappearing.
But look closer — with every shave, the pencil becomes sharper, clearer, more ready to leave its mark. Its shrinking isn’t waste, it’s proof of work. Pages filled. Equations solved. Sketches drawn. Thoughts made visible.
We’re not so different. Life sharpens us too. Each challenge, each mistake, each late night or early morning — they wear us down in inches. Sometimes it feels like we’re running out of ourselves. But maybe, like the pencil, that’s when we’re doing our most important work.
A brand-new pencil looks perfect in the box, tall and unbroken. But it hasn’t written a single word. Its beauty is potential, not proof. A used pencil, though — short, smudged, maybe even cracked — carries the story of everything it’s created.
The truth is, we’re meant to be used. To spend ourselves on learning, on love, on building, on dreaming. To grow a little smaller in body but sharper in spirit.
One day, the pencil will be too short to hold. And one day, so will we. But by then, if we’ve left enough marks behind, on paper, on people, on the world, then shrinking wasn’t losing. It was living.
October, 2025
