Pencils always seem to be hiding around a house. There’s for sure one between the couch cushions. There’s another behind the TV stand. You’re guaranteed to find at least two in the front pocket of an old backpack. And, after sticking a hand broom under your nightstand, you’re a little surprised when a pencil doesn’t roll into the dustpan.

Everything else pulled out of these neglected nooks—hair, dirt, receipts, paper clips, wrappers–gets automatically dumped into the garbage. After all, we think, if we needed these things, we would’ve immediately picked them up upon dropping them, instead of leaving them on the floor. But curiously, this reasoning doesn’t apply to pencils. Even though they were dropped and ignored, we still pick them up, clean them off, and then put them into that living room cup–only to one day drop them again.

Why do we do that? It’s not for aesthetic reasons. An orange cylindrical piece of wood doesn’t make a room appear nicer. And it’s not for functional reasons, as everyone now has a smartphone where you can take notes. So what makes us hold on to the pencil?

Lessons

Maybe they remind us of elementary school, and the life lessons learned during that time: responsibility, sharing, and reputation.

Pencils were your first taste of responsibility. At 6 years old, when you prepared for your first day of school, your parents thought you were ready to take care of something. It was small, it was cheap, but it was a test: keep the pencil for a while– don’t lose it. So when the bell rang, you learned to resist your muscles pulling you out to recess, and instead, pause, scan, then put back your possessions.

Not everyone was responsible, though. Some of your classmates forgot their pencils, and that’s when you learned about sharing. If it was your friend that forgot his/her pencil, it was a sign of support to let them borrow one of yours. If it was your nemesis, it felt like a win to smirk and say, “No, you can’t use mine.” It was aggravating when someone lost or broke your pencil. There was confrontation when someone claimed your pencil was, actually, theirs.

But sometimes you were the forgetful one. That’s when you learned about reputation. Upon noticing you left your pencil case at home, you asked the class if anybody had an extra you could borrow. No one answered. When you looked around, your classmates looked away. Your eyes went to Clare’s bulging pencil case. Then next to her, you saw Shireen blatantly hand one to Emily. And then, behind them, David, who you thought was your friend, had three of them between his knuckles, pretending to be Wolverine. But none of them lent you one! First, you felt confused. Second, angry. Third, a sobering reel of all the borrowed pencils you’d lost, forgotten, or broken played behind your eyes. Fourth, you realized that you’d been labelled a “pencil loser’.

So maybe when we stumble upon a dusty pencil under our desk, it’s respect for all these lessons that stops us from throwing it away.

Character

Or maybe it’s because of the object itself. Pencils are one of those things that can gain “character”. Like a car. When someone says a car has “character”, they are saying that the dent above the back right tire and the crooked antenna make it look old, but they are also commenting on its uniqueness, as these flaws tell the tale of your time with the vehicle. The same goes for pencils. When I’m teaching, I often see students writing with something that looks more like a mangled twig than a pencil, as it’s barely the size of their thumbs and bumpy from their bite marks. Even though this deformed tool makes their writing terrible and hurts their hand and they have another, more functional, one in their case, they stubbornly hang on to that pencil because invested time made it their pencil.

Honesty

Or maybe it’s because the pencil’s simplicity: a stick of graphite encased in wood cylinder. There’s a refreshing honesty to that visual straightforwardness. Pencils don’t hide their finite nature; you can see how much wood there’s left to shave, how much lead is left to spread. In this sense, they are unlike cars. On the outside, a car might look fine, but they are prone to suddenly and mysteriously dying on us. Pencil do no such thing. So maybe we hold on to pencils because they’re forthcoming about how much they have left. 

Human

Or maybe it’s because pencils remind us of being human.

Writing with a pencil is a revelatory act. It exposes effort and doesn’t mask missteps–a big reason they’re used in schools. Across the hundreds of handwritten worksheets, book reports, and comprehension questions, our teachers spotted our effort before reading the first sentence. And we could see it, too! When we cared, the page showed neat writing, clear spaces, and few smudges. When we didn’t care, the page showed inconsistent spaces, smudge marks, scribbles, and words that dipped and rose on the lines like waves.

A page of pencil is a candid reflection of the wavering quality of our being. Just as our thoughts are never constant, our letters are never the same. Just as our body weakens as we tire, our words become fatter and sloppier the longer we write without pause. Just as we can be doing well then unexpectedly mess up, our fingers can slip during a nice sentence. And just as we can’t get rid of a past mistake, pencils leave smudges, streaks, or shavings on a paper that no eraser can completely remove.

Good and bad, it’s all on the page. When we were kids, that was fine. Over and over, we wrote and handed in sheets that flashed our inconsistent and flawed self without shame. Because what was there to be ashamed about? Humanity was on the lined 7 ½ by 11, and we were human, right? 

Yet, as we grew older, this changed. Eventually, we weren’t supposed to submit work in pencil anymore and moved to other utensils: the mechanical pencil, the pen, and the keyboard.

The move to the mechanical pencil was a subtle step towards concealing the time it took to complete work. Unlike a regular pencil, you couldn’t see your letters fattening the longer you wrote because the mechanical pencil’s tip stayed the same size: 0.5 or 0.7. Furthermore, the mechanical pencil’s body never got shorter and its lead could be refilled for infinity. The mechanical pencil, in this sense, gave no evidence of entropy.

Then came the pen with its posture of perfection. When you got permission to use pens, you were no longer allowed to make mistakes. The pimples of process—rough drafts and slip-ups—were now for your eyes only and needed to be hidden from the public. For example, when you misspelled a name on a birthday card, you could no longer squeeze in the missing letter, scribble it out, or even use white-out—you just had to throw it out and get another card. The pen announced the presentation-like quality of being an adult in that you’re supposed to uphold a veneer of flawlessness for others. 

Finally, you got to the keyboard, which completely erased all visual evidence of our identity. On a phone, tablet, or laptop, there are no more hints of humanity. Take this essay for example. You have no sense of how many times I wrote this sentence. No matter my focus or typing speed, all the “i”s are dotted and the “a”s look alike, the spaces are even, and the sentences stay within the margins. In fact, there’s no way to tell that I even wrote this because everyone looks the same behind a keyboard.

90s kids, which includes me, were so enthusiastic to embrace the keyboard. Keyboards represented “the cool future”, and, by contrast, pencils stood for “the lame past”. Growing alongside the rapid spread of the internet, 90s kids came to feel (or marketers made us feel) that all the new computers, iPods, Xboxes, and smartphones belonged to a future that was ours, one that adults couldn’t and didn’t want to understand. Our small, curious hands seized the keyboard, and we became the first generation to explain Windows shortcuts to our parents. The first children to figure out T9 texting. The first to express our first “I love you” in an MSN chatroom. The first to discover heartbreak tears in front of a glowing monitor. The first teens to build and destroy self-esteem on virtual profiles. Through all this, typing on a keyboard became a whole generation’s mode of expressing our individual and collective identity.

And yet, the more keyboards are used in our daily lives, the less we (and all others forced to embrace the times) see ourselves in writing. Our letters don’t look like they come from our hands. All of our reports, e-mails, texts, comments, and Tinder messages are processed into uniformity. And, in response to all this, I can’t help but wonder: with nothing on our everyday screens to remind us that we are inconsistent, that we are changing, that good work comes after mistakes and time, and that people will like us despite our flaws, maybe we’re more likely to forget that we’re only human.

So, when we find a pencil in the bowels of our house, do we pick it up because of some abstract reason like “lessons” or “character” or “honesty” or “humanity”? Or is it just because a pencil might rip a hole in our garbage bag and make a mess? I don’t know, but I like to think of the pencil as this old and true object that reminds us of when it was OK to make mistakes.