To you bards:

When pen and ink have nothing to employ them, look to the young. Look to the youth, not to mentor, not as a teacher, not even because they are the future, but because they are selves. Each one a fount of possibilities, waiting to spring forth, a fount all their own.

What a boon, the young mind may experience, from you and no other, oh bard.

I say not, place yourself in the shoes of some holder of an unknown world view. Instead, remember back, place yourself in your own shoes, shoes not of another, shoes not of a self, whose thoughts you can but imagine. Put on rather familiar slipper, slip into your young developing perceptions. Now you are young. Your days are carefree, a time of play, a time of friends, even a time the opposite sex were playmates or alternately some varied race with alien ideas of amusement.

Eating breakfast, the day ahead, a sea of hopes, joys, longings, sorrows, fears. Emotions that, later in life, will fill the canvas of your outlook. Emotions now, that loom not, paling even vanishing completely, yielding to the grandeur, the newness of the world, the possibilities.

How much an impact would it have had on that tender, young, stubborn, possibly willful, but most assuredly all knowing soul, had a bard happened along: talked to you; helped you shape images in your mind to word understandable; showed you to the art of wordsmithing; opened your mind the wonder of culture, the melody of language, the phrasing of ideas.

Oh, think of the eyes, those portals of the soul, when in print the awkward, precocious, confident, yet insecure developing person glimpses, for the first time, their name on a byline next to yours.