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My 3-year-old son, J.T., found a small glass stone in the shape of a heart, which he calls “The Power of Love.”
Imagine that, the power of love condensed into a small transparent stone that fits in the center of your hand.
I’m not sure what powers J.T. has ascribed to this rock, but it’s significant enough he carried it to bed with him, secure in his palm until just before he drifted to sleep.
By this time, we heard the telltale sounds of my wife returning home — tires crunching in gravel, dogs going bananas in the living room.
“Is that mom?” he asked.
“I think so.”
“Can I go see her?”
I told him no. It was time to sleep. He wrestled with the concept for a moment before finally telling me he had to go see her because she needed “The Power of Love.”
He opened his hand, and the small glass stone caught the light.
How could I deny him that? And how could I deny her, returning from what was likely a long and stressful day?
J.T. threw off his blankets and rushed to the living room. “I have the Power of Love for you,” I heard him say.
And behold, it was. You could hear it in my wife’s voice.
Besides my work for the newspaper, I write a lot of fiction.
Most good stories are about their themes or moral arguments. A character, or a group of characters, must learn the moral argument (or reject it) by the end of the story, or else everyone’s time is wasted. You may have thought stories (movies included) are just a series of interesting events. And some are.
Those are the ones you usually forget about as time goes by.
The theme is usually tied to the flaws the main character must overcome. For example, in “Finding Nemo,” Marlin, the father figure, must overcome his overprotective nature in order to save his son and give him the childhood he deserves.
You might make a theme out of J.T.’s stone. You could write a whole story around it.
Here’s my moral argument — you may want to clutch love in the palm of your hand as you go to sleep, but you must throw open the doors of your life and give it to the people who need it.
I wonder how different my life might have been if I’d remembered to give away that little stone in my hand more often, how different it may become if I remember to give it away going forward.
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A version of this post was previously published on CourierNews.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock