A Student of the Past

All of us are students. We have all learned from teachers, both alive and dead. But very few of us have moved past being a student. There are few teachers, for a teacher is someone that has learned from the past and built to create a new idea. To create a new path or move down a path that has little traveled. It is the teachers that forge new thought processes, that motivated students to seek more and learn more than what they had previously knew.

From my personal experience, I am a student of C.S. Lewis. Though he is long gone his teachings and stories live on. Many people may be able to apply his stories to their own lives, very few make their own letters. It is really the student that imitates their teacher, that moves beyond the path that the teacher has put forth. 

Like I said, I am a student of C.S. Lewis. He has placed a path in front of me with the Screwtape letters. I took a step in his footsteps and created the Nailbed Memos. The Memos started for me in frustration of trying to locate some new works that followed along the same lines. None were found, much to my disappointment. So being the writer that I am, I started a blank document. Nothing came. So I went outside, took a walk, followed my feet until an idea came to mind. I noticed that many people, though surrounded by nature, were not paying any attention to it. Their headphones and cellular devices had nabbed their focus. That’s when the idea struck me. A memory from a couple of years back. It said that the attention span of a modern adult American was that of about 5 minutes. That was when another thought came to mind, the time that I was in university, I excelled at flash stories. 

So I made a flash story about a demon talking to another that he was mentoring. Each story took about 5 minutes to write and read, each story dealt with modern day issues. 

I followed Lewis’ lessons and made them more comprehensive for the modern man. Thus the Nailbed Memos were wrought.