“We are all inventors, each sailing our on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.”   Ralph Waldo Emerson

Oh, Ralph, Ralph! What an intrepid troubadour of the spirit you are and how your words sparkle and shine, lighting our way!

We are “all inventors” and “the world is all gates” — what an uplifting, inspiring vision of our role and the page. Let’s take Ralph at his word and meet today with him as our navigator. What would the day look like if we did this? Here are a few guideposts:

As inventors, we’d have we’d be curious and willing to tinker and try different approaches until we found the one that worked best.

As inventors, we’d bring a spirit of playfulness to our day, a kind of joyful expectancy that a baby has, when everything is fresh and new and amazing.

As inventors, we’d bring ingenuity and creativity to the page, spinning out sentences and then lassoing them and whirling them around this way and that. We’d come up with three or five different ways to advance our plots and a raft of juicy words to describe our characters and the conflicts we plunge them into.

As inventors, we might take Edison as our model and remember that “Inspiration is 99 percent perspiration” — and once we generated lots of ideas, we’d keep working at them with patience and persistence until they yielded gold.

And if the world were “all gates,” how would we feel about it?

When “the world is all gates,” it’s a friendly, welcoming place and we can find our way through it with clarity and calm rather than angst and struggle.

When “the world is all gates,” anything is possible — the sky is the limit. No avenue for getting our work out into the world is closed to us. No gatekeepers bar our way.

When “the world is all gates,” we have ease of being — we know the right path for us. Our inner guide and the opportunities we pursue are in harmony — and all is well.

What a pleasure it would be to labor in the vineyards of a world so open and inviting — and one in which our inventiveness meets opportunities without struggle or strain!

What’s your story about all this? If Ralph has a better one, why not embrace it and see what happens? Let’s choose to be inventors today and see the world full of open gates. Write on!