Editor's note: With a pen, you can write only a few numbers, or you can complete a long masterpiece, or you can sit there and wait for the pen to evaporate; you can plan slowly and consider each word, or you can trust the reins and let the pen gallop; you can write about all kinds of things in the world, you can entertain others and yourself, you can do whatever you want, you can... But what if I give you a life? This little English essay uses such a hypothesis to cause us to think deeply about life.

Suppose someone gave you a pen — a sealed, solid-colored pen. You couldn’t see how much ink it had.

It might run dry after the first few tentative words or last just long enough to create a masterpiece (or several) that would last forever and make a difference in the scheme of things. You don’t know before you begin.

Under the rules of the game, you really never know. You have to take a chance!

Actually, no rule of the game states you must do anything. Instead of picking up and using the pen, you could leave it on a shelf or in a drawer where it will dry up, unused.

But if you do decide to use it, what would you do with it? How would you play the game?

Would you plan and plan before you ever wrote a word?

Would your plans be so extensive that you never even got to the writing?

Or would you take the pen in hand, plunge right in and just do it, struggling to keep up with the twists and turns of the torrents of words that take you where they take you?

Would you write cautiously and carefully, as if the pen might run dry the next moment, or would you pretend or believe (or pretend to believe) that the pen will write forever and proceed accord glee?

And of what would you write: Of love? Hate? Fun? Misery? Life? Death? Nothing or Everything?

Would you write to please just yourself? Or others? Or yourself by writing for others?

Would your strokes be tremblingly timid or brilliantly bold? Fancy with a flourish or plain?

Would you even write? Once you have the pen, no rule says you have to write. Would you sketch? Scribble? Doodle or draw?