Punctured Tires and Thumb Tacks

We hollow out without utility. – Kyle McCord, “I’m Concerned You Will be Reincarnated as Office Supplies”

We all have talents and skills and predispositions toward certain lines of study. If we don’t use those talents and skills or refuse to attend to our studies, we first start to rust. We eventually “hollow out” because we aren’t exercising ourselves.

We have a purpose. Ignoring it is like puncturing a tire with a thumb tack. The tire has a purpose and may be capable of being repaired for the first few weeks, but it loses both the longer its puncture is left unattended. If left to its own devices, the tire doesn’t repair itself. It sheds its rim and becomes just some more blackened pulp littering the interstate shoulder. The tire has no purpose. It has been lost because it wasn’t cared for, because it wasn’t used properly.

If right use is the necessary air, then we must be used more often. We must exercise our skills and talents. We must pursue our studies. We must seek to find our “utility” rather than be lost alongside a road or dumped in a graveyard of tire remnants. We must seek to live every day in light of our purpose, the thing to which we have been called.

That thing doesn’t have to be grand. Some days, it’s as simple as rewarding a student’s effort with praise. On others, as McCord’s poem suggests, it’s being the syringe that saves a son from a peanut allergy or the thumb tacks holding a “preschooler’s / Venus in its elliptical orbit on the board.” Utility doesn’t require extraordinary; it just requires an ordinary person being willing and having the courage to be used.

Image: atalou (Creative Commons)