TAKE UP YOUR PEN AND WRITE

If only every word we speak were written, the world would be full of books with no library big enough to house them. People talk a lot. We talk when we are at home with the family. We talk when we are out and away with friends. We talk at school and in the church. In fact we even talk in our dreams. But who is courageous enough to put them into written words?
Everybody has a story. Stories borne out of life experience and encounters. No story is unworthy of hearing. It is story that people love the most. It is stories that make a rowdy crowd keep calm, it make children slumber on their mother's arms.  More so, the stories that are first hand experienced in nature. But why are people afraid of telling their own stories? Have people become so fearful of their real life? They enjoy listening and reading about others but tack theirs away. Is it not only fair to take and give?

It takes courage and sacrifice to put ones life to bare for people to read. The few who have done so, have greatly impacted on the life of humanity. The majority, still die in what my friend Sammy Lekky Letty call "dying full" instead of "dying empty"  the grave is reacher than heaven's fortune. But writing goes beyond personal stories. It is in the manifestation of our environment. Everything you see, feel and hear is worth writing about.

Look at it this way. It takes one person to tell a  few people a story orally. But the same person can tell the whole world the same story through written word. Imagine people like Leo Tolstoy, Plato, Aristotle or even Shakespeare. Think about that book you read everyday, the Bible.  Had the disciples of Jesus failed to take up the pen, what would you be reading in church today?  You are doing a great disservice to the future generation by not writing the issues that affect this generation.

Whenever somebody start to tell me the story about his life, what goes through my mind is how that story would be of value to people across the globe some of whom will never live to meet us in life. I think about those stories in written form so as to reach millions of people beyond the limitations of the grave.

Take up a pen and write your life. Write frantically like Dostoyevsky did. Write like Paul of the Bible. Don't put your pen down. Write in the language you know and understand. Leave translation to the citizens of the world. We will take the message across languages and your name will be written on the four corners of the world. Write like it is your last book.

TAKE UP YOUR PEN AND WRITE
By Gen Tito Okello Jr