What do you consider to be boring? (Prompt c/o 500 Writing Prompts by Barnes & Noble)
Tapping his pencil restlessly on his knee, John watched the scoreboard as the last few seconds on the clock began to dwindle. The squeak of sneakers and the sound of the bouncing ball had dulled as John’s senses focused on those few measly seconds standing between him and adventure. Quite frankly, his algebra homework had been more riveting than his big brother’s basketball game. As the final buzzer screeched, John shot up from the bleachers where he sat and made a beeline for the door, his mother slowly trailed behind him through the sea of fans. John couldn’t wait any longer. He needed to sit down at his desk with a fresh piece of paper and his favorite pencil, and write. While he had been “watching” the game, his imagination had poked and prodded at his dwindling attention span and showered him with restlessness. He couldn’t get home fast enough. When his mother pulled into the driveway, John leapt out of the blue minivan with Olympic determination as his need to write cheered him on towards the ultimate finish line: his desk.
He settled in his grey swivel chair, reached for his stubby yellow pencil and a blank canvas, and unleashed his mind to do its work. John’s pencil began to paint the pictures of times gone by, of medieval warriors and damsels in distress. He could almost hear the clink of swords with every impact between pencil and paper. The words galloped through his mind faster than his pencil could record. The times-passed seemed so short, so infinitesimally small in the grand scheme of things; nevertheless, the words proceeded to run at lightning speed. But he began to feel the electricity leave his hands as he wrote… the past began to seem dull and concrete.
His story quickly morphed and changed from the past to the future. John had become disenchanted with the things passed. The stories he had already written interested him about as much as this brother’s basketball game had. They were old news. So he and his trusty steed journeyed on into a chrome-colored futuristic land filled with high-tech houses and flying cars. He didn’t look back at the words he had written, he only looked forward. New sentence. New story. New. Fresh. Clean. Adventure. But these words and ideas flowed slower and challenged John’s mind. He found himself grappling with a plan for his story, a cohesive idea, a realistic prediction of his story’s future. His mind ached with the strain of looking so far forward. Boredom began to take the shape of a flying car and the color of chrome.
So his focus shifted once more, to the most riveting stories of them all: the story of Now. John wrote as the words flowed, steadily, unrelentingly, unstoppably. The present: that is the most important story to tell. It is the place where living is done, where love is found, where the heart beats and the lungs breathe. The ever-present Now. He shifted his tense and wrote about the tantalizing smell of his mother’s cooking in the kitchen, the sound of the basketball traveling through the net as his brother practiced outside, the comforting presence of the little yellow pencil in his hand and the not so blank page he held in front of him. This was the story he needed to tell.
The Now is the greatest story of all.
Sweet Serendipity 