It’s 7:08a, and it’s mostly dark in our home. There’s a lamp on in the corner of the house, while the sun is just starting to peak through some of the slow rolling clouds outside the window in the den. It’s chilly outside, too. This is the first time this fall that we’ve needed to turn on our heater, so our home has that warm, welcoming feeling as you walk across the rug to sit on the couch with a morning cup of coffee.
While I sit here, I’m thinking about a conversation I had yesterday with a friend, who’s also a writer. We were talking about why we never talk about our writing or why we never promote it to anyone. We talked about how we would much rather our writing stay tucked away for the world not to see. Not because our writing isn’t good, his is great, but because the world will find it and can ruin it. We talked about how the world can also ruin us. How something we write or have written in past years could be dug up and spun into something it was never meant to be. How someone can twist our words, once used for good, and turn them into something damning. Because that’s what the world wants to see these days.
The world wants to see perfection. It wants to see justice. It wants to see reckoning.
And I don’t blame it. I want those things too.
But now, the world leaves little room for mistakes, little room for grace and little room for peace.
I hope we soon found out how we can have all of these and hold them equally, without the objective of ruining each others lives, but rather have an objective of help other build better ones.
-Cliff
Cliff’s Note: Don’t hit cancel; press pause.