An apprentice asked how long it takes to learn to judge a joint by eye,
and was told seven years, which landed like a sentence handed down.

In the fifth year they noticed they had stopped measuring,
and could not name the week it had happened,
so they went back through every notebook looking for the entry.
It was not there.
Nothing that mattered had ever been written down on the day it arrived.

The Book of the Scholar — Return 42:6