“MY WHOLE LIFE IS WAITING FOR THE QUESTIONS TO WHICH I HAVE PREPARED ANSWERS”.

As the mind records the events of the day, it is as if important issues are recorded in large indelible ink, things we really need to worry about or continue to celebrate stand out in permanent marker. The small niggles and trivialities of the day however are as if written on a blackboard; as the day progresses more and more is written upon it. It gets filled with problems and their solutions, ideas are written in and rubbed out. Mistakes are made and corrected, things are added up and things are taken away.

Unlike words committed to paper, writing on a blackboard is meant to be transient, a work in progress, and a moveable feast if you need it to be. It’s not one dimensional like a blog or secretive like a diary, it is communal and what is written is for sharing. Other people’s opinions are welcomed and recorded, problems are discussed and shared. Mistakes are not personal and solutions are often a joint decision, many will contribute and the outcome is everyone’s shared experience.

It gets dusty and smudged as the day wears on, until it is quite difficult to remember what all the writing was about. When there is no more room left to write, but we feel nothing is too trivial to erase, often overfull and with problems unanswered we leave it to the night. T.S.Elliot wrote “Let us go then you and I when the evening is spread out against the sky, there will be time yet for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea”.  Magically over night the blackboard is wiped clean and when we realise the memory of what was written has faded too we understand that none of it was important and we don’t need to worry about yesterday any longer. Today is clean and fresh, it's a new beginning and has the potential to be a great day, it might even be a day worth writing about in indelible ink.

 “There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk”.            Jean-Paul Sartre

Title quote by Tom Stoppard