one line

Sometimes, I think about one line. One line from a play, one line from a text, one line from a book, one line of music.

If you take out the line, how much does it have an effect on the rest of the piece? If you think about it, every sketch is made of a series of lines; every book is made of lines of text, every text message is a line of communication, every spoken word in a play is called a line. One line is all you need to connect one thing to another. It's true that the more lines you have connecting two things, the tighter they're linked, and the harder it is to erase the line.

Sometimes, I think, what if one line was left out? Think of your favorite poem, or your favorite song. How different would it be if your favorite line was left out? Would it still be your favorite?

Often, I get a song stuck in my head, and it's one line from that song. If it's a song I don't like, occasionally I wish that the one line would just disappear and that I could forget it entirely. But if that line is the "backbone" of the song, or the point of the poem, or the first words in a conversation with that really cute person you've been trying to get your nerve up to talk to for ages now, or "I love you," then it seems like the one line, that one connection, isn't just one line. It's more than one line. 

I was thinking, if you picked a line from a book, any line, and took it out, the chances of it mattering are pretty slim. You would have lots of other lines of text to give you information and context. But in a sonnet, taking out one line would make an entirely different poem. And in a haiku, one line missing ruins the structure completely.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that every line matters. Every decision, every connection, every day matters. Yes, you might just think of it as one line of text in a life, or one measure of music in a song, and that it's ok because you have context and other lines to back it up and give context. But sometimes, if you have a limited number of pencil strokes, or lines, in the painting of your life, it seems to me that it's important to keep tracing over the lines that you want to really stand out, so they won't fade. 

If you leave one line out, then how do you know?

I was thinking about this in church as I was singing a hymn. And then as we stopped singing, I thought of the first poem I ever worked at memorizing. I was in fourth grade, and I still remember most of it. It's the one about the roads diverged in the yellow wood. The last line says, "And I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." Even if you claimed that "and that has made all the difference is actually a second line, if you took either one of them out, the poem would not be nearly as impactful. The person in the poem drew a lonely line that probably went in a roundabout way, but realized that he/she would never get back to that exact place, time, and situation...so even if the exact intersection was visited multiple times, it would never be the same. 

Every. Line. Counts.