A couple weeks ago, I was stuck waiting on a train. We’ve all been there. We get to a railroad crossing, the lights light up, the bars go down, and all you can do is wait while a train goes by. Trains are very cool. I like to look them over as they go by. Try to see things I haven’t seen before. It never fails, though. There’s one thing I always see on the side of the trains: graffiti.

Up and down the cars of the trains, there’s the elaborate painting of people’s tags. These artists sneak into the railyards and make their mark on the trains. Some are pretty cool, but others you can tell they were rushing because they didn’t want to get caught. Yet, cool or rushed, I must admit. I always struggle with reading them. Whether the word doesn’t make sense or all the letters are big and bubbly, I stare at them for the colors most of the time since I can’t interpret what it’s trying to say. A friend of mine suggests most of the tags are people names–pen names, artistic names, what they want to be known by. It got me thinking.

These trains travel all across the nation. Thousands of people get stopped by them at these railroad crossings and watch them go by. So, these artists tagging the trains reach a wide audience of people with their work. And yet, all they put on the trains is their calling card?

I am–by no means–promoting the tagging or graffiti on trains. People work hard to take great care of the trains. Most of the graffiti on the side, doesn’t help their appearance, in my opinion. But, if someone is going to break the law by breaking into a train yard to leave their mark on one of the cars, they might as well give it a purpose. I doubt anyone cares about the bubbly letters they can’t read or the tag names that have no meeting to them. With as wide of an audience that sits on the railroad tracks, you could send a message–preferably something that the train workers aren’t going to power wash off right away. You could spread encouragement down those rails. Share what you believe. Just think, if someone is having a bad day and gets stuck at a train track, they could look up and see whatever encouraging message is tagged on there and that could change their whole day. Something like that would definitely make a bigger impact than a random name on the side of a train.

Again, I am not promoting graffiti on trains. Don’t give the hard working train workers more work to do by washing away your art. Go find yourself a more permanent canvas you actually own. But, if you must tag a train, and can’t stop yourself. At least try to spread a little hope. You stand a better chance of making a difference that way.

About a week or so ago, I pulled out an old tub that was full of old school stuff. Mostly high school. It was all my notebooks, notes, some homework, old tests, articles, projects. Pretty much everything I ever collected throughout high school with a little bit of jr. high and elementary mixed in.

It ended up taking me over an hour to go through that one tub. A lot of it, I looked at and thought “why am I keeping this? I don’t care what grade I got on that history homework and I don’t really care about these notes from math.” I ended up recycling a lot of papers and trashing my old, fallen apart binders and folders.

Goodbye tests. Goodbye homework. Goodbye math notes.

Now, I probably could’ve kept my notes for reflection purposes. Reteach myself what I learned in school back then. Be the wiz I used to be, but let’s face it. I’m not going to go through the chemistry and biotechnology notes or reflect on the lab we did counting these little stem thingies on a plant. Sure, the anatomy stuff, I’ll probably save, but algebra’s gone out the door a long time ago.

I had several piles surrounding me as I went through this tub. Trash, recycle, undecided, keep, random non-school thing, etc. You want to know what ended up in my keep pile?

Art. Poems. Doodles. Creative writings I did outside of Class. And most importantly, the unused pages of the notebooks.

Looking through my school stuff, what I valued most was the creations I made instead of the knowledge I learned. I even got frustrated when flipping through my notebooks. I had some subject notebooks that were only used for a few pages or still had half the notebook unused. It drove under my skin that these perfectly good notebooks weren’t used all the way through because they contained school notes.

I like to say “There’s nothing scarier than a blank piece of paper,” because a blank piece of paper is untapped potential and these notebooks were full of them.

So, I ripped out the notes.

I took out every page that didn’t have something I cared about on it and fed those pages to the recycle bin. All that’s left of my school tub is a stack of art. The notebooks are sitting on my desk, ready to have purpose again.

Do you have anything from your high school days? Any notes or tests or projects you held onto? Why did you keep them? I thought it was interesting how I cared more about my doodles and creative writings than I did my notes. I’m sure there’s probably people out there who would be the opposite. Maybe some of you only kept one subject and trashed the rest?

Kind of a cool reminder that we’re all unique.