What is the weight of potential?
Posted on December 4th 2017 by Gerald A. Livings
What is the weight of potential? A hard question to answer. How does one weigh an idea? A thought? A nebulous concept that has not fully formed?
A hard question to answer.
How does one weigh an idea?
A thought?
A nebulous concept that has not fully formed?
How do we communicate potential to others?
By speaking? What does speech weigh? I may join you in a light and airy conversation and then change to a discussion of weighty topics. But how to place those words on a scale? Words can be written. That might be a possibility. What is the physical weight of our conversation as written? Not the paper the conversation is written on, but the words themselves.
So I searched for things to do with pencils. I found pages about wood pencils, mechanical pencils. how to use a pencil. I found out that a pencil can draw a line 3.5 miles long. You can roughly write 2/3rds of an average length novel. You can sharpen it over ten times.
Many interesting facts.
But you will not find much on the internet about the amount of potential a pencil holds.
Art. Math. Medicine. Love. Hate.
With a check mark, a jury can decide a person is guilty of a crime. With a signature, A president can grant a pardon. With a signature, A world leader can end a war. A doctor can mark where he needs to cut to save a child’s life.
All of that potential can be held. In your hand.
Simply by picking up and holding a pencil.
The shapes and forms might change over thousands of years. A stick is used to scratch on a mud covered piece of wood. A sliver of lead is used to write on papyrus. A bird quill is used to write on parchment. A graphite pencil is used on paper. And now, a plastic pencil is used to write on the screens of your phones and computers. As long as there are people, we will make pencils in some form and each one will carry all of the potential of every persons thoughts, dreams and desires.
The answer is that potential, all potential combined, weighs as much as a pencil.
