The Difference a Dot Makes

In the middle of his dream, an artist awoke.  He reached for his pencil and started to draw.  He started with a single dot.  It took the artist hours to finish his picture, and afterwards he collapsed back into bed.  Soon he was asleep again, still smiling from thoughts of what he had drawn.

The dot, on the other hand, was not as happy.  It looked around the page and saw lines all around. They were long and colorful, and the dot was neither.  “I don’t belong here,” it thought, “I am just a small, meaningless dot and this picture does not need me.”  So the dot jumped off of the page.

It approached a newspaper that was lying nearby. There were dots all over the newspaper.  “Surely this is where I am meant to be,” it said aloud.  As soon as the dot hopped onto the front page of the newspaper, all the other dots started to yell.  “You cannot stay here!” they said.  “Why not?” asked the dot. “You are dots, and you are here.”

“We are not dots,” they said, “we are periods, and we belong in books, and stories, and newspapers. You are just a dot.”  The dot felt silly, so it left the newspaper.

Then the dot saw a white cube with dots on every side.  “This is where I belong,” it thought to itself.  “Excuse me,” it said politely to four dots sitting on a side of the cube, “I am a dot and you are dots, so may I join you?”

“No, you may not,” said the four dots. “We are dots on a pair of dice. An extra dot would ruin a pair of dice.”  The dot felt silly again and hopped over to the artist who was sound asleep.

“I wonder why he drew me…” thought the dot.  And that’s when it saw dots on the artist’s hand and arm.  “Perhaps this is where I was meant to be,” said the dot as it crawled onto the artist’s hand and rested.

“Ahem,” said one of the dots on his arm.  “AHEM!” said the arm dot even louder. “You are not a freckle. You are a dot, and only freckles belong here.”  “Aren’t freckles a type of dot?” asked the dot, who was not feeling welcome anymore.

“Yes, we are,” said the freckle, “We are a special kind of dot, and you are definitely not one of us.”  (Of all the dots it had met, the rejected dot felt that freckles were clearly the rudest.)  The dot did not know what to do. It didn’t belong with lines, or periods, or dice, or rude freckles.

The artist woke up at that very moment and went to look at his picture, but he was heartbroken by what he saw.  He held up the drawing and sighed.  “Where has my seed gone?” he cried.

“This is supposed to be a picture of a seed in the soil before it grows into a mighty tree, but without the seed, it is useless, and I cannot draw another so perfect as I did the first time,” said the artist sadly.

The dot began to feel silly one last time. It had not realized that all along it was not just a dot, but also a seed.  A seed may start off small, but there’s no telling how large it will become, how many beautiful leaves it will grow, and how many people will find shelter under it.

The dot jumped back onto the page. It jumped onto the exact spot it had left because it knew that, although it was just a small dot, it meant much more in the big picture.