Let's Walk Together

and stop time with a ballpoint pen

The world doesn’t wait for anyone. 

Moments we live are gone as soon as they come. They turn quickly to memories, soon to be forgotten, lost in the clutter of everyday busyness. 

Everyone has their own way of combating the impermanence of this life. I just prefer doing it with words. Writing is a courageous longing to create permanence in a fleeting world. At least that’s how I like to see it.

Because of that, I thought writing was everyone’s first love. 

And every 8-year-old kept a journal detailing the people grocery shopping and dog walking. And every 13-year-old wrote letters to her future self. And every 17-year-old workshopped poems about finitude in the margins of her physics homework. That inside every girl was a craving to stop time with a ballpoint pen. 

While that might not be the case for everyone, I have always loved what writing does to me.

How it makes me look inside to see what the day did to my heart. And how it keeps me awake to the small wonders of the outside world. To the conversations I overhear at the bakery and the cardinals perched on the telephone wire. The world we share is drenched in inspiration. It hides in the sidewalks of oak-lined streets and waits in the cicada-serenaded drive home from supper.

But it’s writing that lets me see it all. 

I remember one night in high school I was flipping through an old National Geographic when I saw a photo of a boy running through a California park. 

The caption below said: 

It has since become my only rule, to walk on the grass. The clipping is ceremonially taped to each bathroom mirror I occupy. It reigns as a reminder that there is still life to live and grass to walk on. 

Of all the stories he’d written, I doubt the journalist remembers that caption. And perhaps by now, he’s dead. But because he did write, those words lived on to tell that park sign’s story.

Permanence in a fleeting world. 

So often, I get comfortable with the life I have already lived. I believe that the memory of every field I’ve run through is enough. That all the beauty there is has already been loved. How quick I am to forget there are still stories to be written. 

So that brings us here, to Substack of all places, where I extend to you an invitation: Let’s walk together. 

By creating this space, I hope to share stories of the unwalked grass. To make them real to me and to you. To remember it all. And maybe along the way, create a little permanence.