Why a Faded Pencil Motto Still Resonates with Me, Years Later

Several years ago, I went to an art exhibition and was invited to pick up a ‘truth pencil’. Scratched into each pencil was a little motto or message that you’d take home with you, and hopefully it would remind you of something important in life.

My pencil just said “best is now”.

I put that pencil on the shelf next to my desk, and many years later, it’s still there. Ironically, the words ‘best is now’ are a little faded, but it’s a constant reminder that even in the harder times, where stuff feels like struggle or drudgery, everything we are and everything we do is still a gift.

Often I look over and see the pencil at just the right moment. If I’m having a hard day, or there’s some new layer of stress being added, when I notice the pencil, I can feel like it's talking back to me.

“Best is now”, it says, and then after I briefly tell it where to go, it reminds me to look for the opportunity or the beauty within the challenge – to see that there might be hidden lessons or another version of this movie where it’s not going to end up in the disaster genre.

Those conversations with my talking pencil are always about the present moment. When we constantly live in the future and think about “what next?”, we can easily catastrophise, or miss the opportunity to savour the good stuff. When we ruminate on the past, we can get stuck in thought processes that make it harder for us to get to somewhere better. But when the pencil reminds me that the “best is now”, I am forced to look only at the present moment, and make the effort to find the things that make that statement true.

So this week, in the good times and the rougher ones, I invite you to carry that little motto with you like a challenge to your reality, and see what it throws up for you:

“best is now”.