A Way With Words

Every day started the same for Zaplin. He greeted the world with contained enthusiasm. And as the sun rose in the eastern sky, he captured his experience in a small black notebook with a thin black pen.

Perhaps the wind was blowing mysteriously that day. Into the notebook, it went. Or maybe he noted how his internal winds were moving, quite obscurely—the notebook held this too. Observation after observation, collected and captured. All available for further reflection upon a moment’s notice, though never seen by anyone else.

The practice built and built until he had five years of notebooks stacked quite perfectly on the right-hand corner of his desk in NYC. A tower of connections, growing like an ancient tree.

The moment arose when Zaplin wondered if he should continue to keep these musings. Was he, perhaps, hoarding his thoughts?

The answer was unclear. But what Zaplin did know is that he started to see his mind differently.

No longer did he view his mind as the resolve and answer to all that lay before him. Instead, he started hearing a higher mind. And this mind knew; knew that he needed to leave his job and pursue a different way of life; knew that his recent breakup was the impetus he required to live his life from a place of truth; knew that something was coming his way.

But what?

He wasn’t quite sure. He continued to wonder if he was holding on to the past in a way that was holding him back when he wanted to propel forward.

He started searching for answers in no other place than his tower of notebooks. Night after night, he read through the contents of his own mind over the last five years. It felt like he was reliving his experience in the most detailed way.

Until one day, he just stopped. Stopped reading and decided to burn his notebooks. Not in a burn-the-books kind of way, but in a type of ceremonial way. It was like an expression of freedom, a rebirth of sorts.

It was an act, in his mind, that would disconnect him from the past so that he could move forward into the future anew.

As the evening approached on that warm, spring Sunday, Zaplin took a big metal bin to the roof of his building and burned his stack of little black notebooks and, with it, his past.

He felt heartbroken and revived all at the same time. He mourned the stack’s presence in the right-hand corner of his desk, and yet, he also opened a new little black notebook the very next morning that showed its readiness for his new evolution of self.

“What will today bring?” He wrote.

And the answer was $20,000.

It’s not every day that money appears out of nowhere. But that morning, Zaplin’s mother said that she had a dream. The weirdest dream. And in the dream, everyone was asleep. The whole entire world was asleep except for Zaplin. And on top of that, he was tasked with waking up the world.

It was a big job, and he had to climb to the top of a skyscraper and scream into a megaphone that had the power to reach the other side of the world. As he was climbing, his mother woke up in the dream knowing that she needed to help her son.

But how?

She ran in her PJs to the building and followed after Zaplin, climbing and climbing the skyscraper. And when she finally reached the top, it was too late. He was already gone. She started sobbing. And couldn’t stop when suddenly a glowing figure approached her. She couldn’t describe it in words, but she felt a lightness that she had never felt in her life. The glowing figure said that she must give her son money. Not in this dream but in real life. $20,000 to be exact. Zaplin’s mother thanked the figure and immediately woke up feeling exuberant from her dream.

She called her son right away and transferred $20,000 into his account.

“But, what is it for, mom?” Zaplin questioned.

“It’s for you, my son," She said with all of the love she had in her heart for him.

And just like that, Zaplin quit his job, bought 12 more small black notebooks, and wrote stories with his thin black pen that would one day awaken the world from their slumber as the sun rose daily in the eastern sky.