A boy was watching his grandmother writing a letter. At one point he asked:
“Are you writing a story about what we have done? Is it a story about me?”
His grandmother stopped writing the letter and answered to her grandson:
“I’m writing about you, actually, but more important than words is the pencil I am using. I hope you’ll be like this pencil when you grow up.”
The boy looked at pencil intrigues. The pencil didn’t seem very special.
“But it’s just like every other pencil I have ever seen!”
“That depends on how you look at things. The pencil has five qualities which, if you manage to hang on them, will make you a peaceful person in this world.”
“First quality: you’re capable of great things, but you must never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps in this world. We call this hand God. He always guides us according to His will. Second quality is now and then. I have to stop writing and use a sharpner.
That makes the pencil suffer a little bit, but afterwards he’s much sharper. You also must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows because they transform you in a better person.
Third quality: the pencil always allows us to use an eraser to rub out any mistakes. This means that correcting something we did is not a bad thing necessarily; but this helps us to keep the road to justice. Fourth quality: what really matters in a pencil is not its wooden exterior, but the graphie inside. So always pay atttention to what is happening inside yourself.
And the last quality of the pencil is that always leaves a marl just in the same way. What you can learn from that is that everything you do in life will leave a mark, so try to be conscious of that in your every action.”
