Parents have forever brought a ledger of rules and regulations, explanations and requirements to the table. I have no idea where they come from, just that one day you have a child in your life and a few seconds later they appear, and in time, with enough experience and knowledge they will be passed down to another generation.  Now don’t get me wrong, these aren’t bound in leather or illustrated books of lore. Instead, they are mentally scripted experiences, all permanently ingrained…like the time you took a nail to the wooden coffee table in the living room as a child, to well…make your mark.

Just like that visible mark you once needed to make in life, these parental commandments are the directives of supervision and wisdom, which mark a good parent…and they need to be followed by those small citizens born unto them. If you are an old school parent like me, I think it is safe to say the majority of them start or end with what is right or what is not right.  That being said, it has taken me over fifty years to admit in complete Bill W honesty, that along with those rules,  I also always needed to be write…and hoped my daughters would as well.  I also believe it proves that I took those childhood commandments to heart…never needing to be reminded of explicit rules, allowing me instead, to journey unwatched into the world with my map and moral compass.

In a time when libraries and card catalogs, decimal indexing and reference rooms mapped my time, I always felt safe and at home, in a simple but novel silence sitting at many a wooden study table. There was a certain air…aside from the sounds of silence, giving me purpose and letting my dreams and imagination come to life. The journeys I took might have worried my parents if they had known, but I was safe…just a page to the end, until my curiosity became sated and peaked, passed between volumes, like so many bowls of hot mashed potatoes at our kitchen table. To have such a freedom is to indeed live the write way, because by enriching my mind and who I would someday  become, as well as meeting characters otherwise unknown, I had a lifetime that would have otherwise been missed.

Also evident along the roads I refused to leave untaken, was that my own one-day book of adult wisdom was coming together at the seams, and I was preparing others for what I wanted them to experience. I think of that now, remembering my daughters when they tested my patience, asking why we needed rules, and I had simply smiled, saying because no matter what the situation, you should always be write. There is no greater badge of courage than having earned one, which has been read.

The world has changed so much since I acquired my books of knowledge, shelved in the library of my soul and indexed by experience…ones I still revisit each day I breathe. However, now there are Kindles to start fires of conversation, and Nooks without crannies, all discovering dark hidden places where adventure could be squirreled away. Yes, they may be unconventional to my old fashioned way of thinking, but they do nevertheless set a similar table, one which feeds the mind and eventually explains not only crime and punishment, but the sad paradise lost if you refuse to see what is write and necessary in life.

Penmanship and grammar have also all but gone the way of the two dollar bill as we set before spell checking keyboards, which embarrassingly auto-correct us into oblivion. However, it is only when we take a moment remembering we are write, taking time to recognize our journey, before auto correct sets us out to dry, that we have a chance to recapture what is still before us. So, instead of automatically heading to the HTML library of Google the next time you need to feed your mind, start your own engine and truly be right for a change. Open real pages and see the words waiting to paint the pixels of your mind.  Continue on from there, and add the silent music to your ears and before you leave, know you found a world where all was within your grasp…indeed, write before you. Make it your mission today, to  become the author of your destiny and create a memorable plot twist,  one nobody saw coming and then offer the same to another open mind…trust me you won’t be breaking any rules, but you might just bookmark something wonderful.