The Colour Pencils I Gave Away

Photo by Kelli Tungay on Unsplash

Towards the end of my teaching career, I started giving each of my graduating students a colour pencil.

One pencil. Each of them, as they left.

Being a teacher was a privilege and the journey with the students was always amazing. The graduation day was a stark reminder that our journey was ending. We would soon part. I wanted to give them something to think about. I wanted them to leave with a deeper reflection of what their actions meant. I wanted them to do their best.

Here is what a colour pencil is, and what I hoped they would see.

A colour pencil gives colour to life.

A colour pencil exists to make things beautiful. It brings colour where there was none. That is its purpose.

And it gives that colour freely. It does not hold back, does not ration itself, does not save the best of itself for later. Every time it touches the page, it gives what it has — fully, generously, without asking what it gets in return.

I wanted them to understand that a life is the same. A life lived in service to others is a life that gives its colour away. We are not meant to stay neat and untouched on the shelf. We are meant to be spent on something worth colouring.

A colour pencil works best as part of a set.

No single pencil can do much on its own. It is only as part of a set — many colours, each different — that a pencil becomes capable of anything real. Each pencil brings a colour to the page; together they bring life to the page.

We are the same. We each bring something to the table, and none of us brings everything.

A colour pencil is hard to erase.

You can erase a pencil line easily. Pencils are made for erasing. But a colour pencil resists it. Press down, commit the colour to the page, and it stays. You can fade it. You can even erase it; but it takes a lot more effort.

What we do to one another is like that. The marks we leave on other people — the words, the kindnesses, the cruelties — do not erase cleanly or easily. We carry the marks others made on us, and others carry ours.

Be careful what you put down. It lasts longer than you think.

A colour pencil has to be sharpened.

A pencil that is never sharpened goes blunt, and a blunt pencil cannot do fine work. To keep its point, it has to be put to the blade. Shavings fall away. It gets shorter still.

Sharpening is not gentle. It takes something from the pencil every time. But it is the only way the pencil stays able to do what it is for.

The hard things do this to us. So does time. The moments that grind against us, the slow drag of the years — the very things that seem only to take from us are often the same things that restore our edge. We are sharpened by what is difficult. It costs us. And it is how we stay sharp enough to be of use.

I am not sure any of my students still have the pencil. I wish I started the tradition earlier. But that is alright. The pencil was never really the point.