Thank God: Talk is Cheap!

The mood is odd as I'm anticipating tomorrow at school, the day on which I'll disconnect the workhorse computer on my desk and put it to bed for the summer, the singular ritualistic act that heralds the "almost there" feeling like nothing else.  This morning while already thinking about putting this PC away, I wondered how many keystrokes my fingertips have made on the various keyboards I've worn through.  How many words, and sentences, and paragraphs, I've cranked out.  Letters to parents.  Lesson plans.  Rubrics for various assignments.  Tests.  Report card comments.  So many, many words.  Yet, for the millions, perhaps, of movements of these fingers, what words of mine might endure?

While channel surfing in the evening for something worth watching on TV I see so many "talk shows" going by that I'd never consider watching.  I hardly take my own opinions seriously, so what would I care to hear about some celebrity's take on things?  It seems sometimes that of all the things we might waste in our lifetimes, words would have to be very near the top of the list, if not at the very pinnacle.  We talk.  We write.  We talk some more.  Day after day we pour words from our mouths and our fingertips into the spaces we occupy, as if trying to fill some kind of perceived void in each space.  Yet, when all is said and done, it seems that much more is ever said than done.

I suppose I'll never consider the mental meanderings that I put into word or into print worthless.  Even if not one of them endures beyond my lifetime, I'll have made some kind of difference with them.  As you sit here reading these words, your life is somehow different than it would have been had you not ventured here just now.  For good or bad or ugly, the difference is made in your reading and it can't be taken back; you can't unread what's already gone through your eyes and into your brain.

That void of which I wrote just a little while ago...  I'm feeling it keenly, but not as a physical space.  Though you "hear" me rejoice every June here as I bid another school year farewell, there's the balancing Karma in the emptiness that comes when in the course of a single day one goes from having a captive audience to spending most of his hours in a day alone.  What then of the words that might pour off this tongue, though for  the lack of a set of ears to receive them they're never spoken?

My Lord, what am I talking about?  I don't know, really.  These are all just words.  And, apparently I have miles and miles more of them to produce before I'm done.  Millions more of these keystrokes.  Sigh!