The Story of the Pen
Vendors came and went in my corporate life. Some were friendly, some were terse, some were fake, some were a necessary evil of doing business. Spreadsheets of third party speakers, suppliers, technology firms sat on my desktop ready for the audit team to ask for my rotating list of contacts I interacted with every week.
Unlike family members, having favorites at work is common; the best friend, the work wife and the special human who blesses you with grace in each interaction. You have favorites, too, right?
Running into positive people with the ability for deep interactions is uncommon in a busy business environment that tracks mouse clicks and productivity like a weight watchers calorie counter.
A rubix cube of agendas, logistics, the keynote speaker’s details stood out in goldfinch yellow on the excel row, symbolizing its importance against the long list of technical jargon and nonsense on our project plan. Jumping off of an excel sheet is not hard to accomplish but stealing the show is harder to do in an ego filled speaker line up.
He oozed certainty and an unabashed kindness that magnified his ability to see others in his orbit. That orbit was 100 or more people wide most days but he always noticed the details.
Nearing the end of our tour and time together, he gifted me a heavy carbon black Pen in a hotel ballroom set up like a college auditorium. I vividly recall feeling the pen gifted to me, passed off like a baton, the weight shocking and impressive. He wanted me to know that I didn’t have to move at the pace I was swirling in. I could find clarity if I found the space to write.
At the time, I was only living in a digital world, emailing, texting, or sending a multitude of calendar invites as a way to show and tell my productivity.
Nothing says success like a full calendar, right?
I had two cell phones, two laptops, endless chargers and extra batteries I lugged around.
Although the Pen came with me from city to city, too, it hid deep in my black worn leather work bag I rarely found time to write to clear my mind or write at all outside of permission slips for my girls’ field trips or grocery lists.
Pre-covid I was on airplanes a lot so I began to test out writing while flying, I found a way to take 10 mins, then 15, then an hour or 2 to write. The space that physical writing created for me was so perceptible, the Pen has been in rotation every day for years now, giving life to my creativity.
Rarely a linear thinker, plagued with thoughts loaded like a slide show, never catching a full through or image, my writing is a place for the arc of thought to show up.
When my writing swirls I can always doodle a rainbow arrow to connect the dots later.
My blue and white home office is littered with things I love to reference; photos, artwork, driftwood, shells, and books. The Pen is the only thing I use everyday to scrawl my mom-kid-work to do lists.
The 24 Oracle Deck was written in a journal and large 3M post it notes. To physically write, is to flow.
If writing feels out of touch or old fashion, there are studies by neuroscientists on the pen-to-paper-mind freedom, allowing our minds to find a burst of artistic flow.
Researchers note that typing on these pesky keyboards does not have the same brain-to-idea execution we all crave at work and home. Ironically, the Pen allows me to move faster or as fast as laptop ideation or slipping into scroll mode instead of focusing.
I want to feel the connection between my thoughts and action, my creativity and my flow the only way I know how–with a fine tip pen to a dotted lined journal. My journals are 10 deep in my desk tray, analog, slow and messy, no longer resisting ink and recycled paper. Scribing the notes into a google or notion document is my editing time, inherently saving me time.
Analog writing feels more 3D to me than a blinking cursor. In my personal life, I crave the freedom of the back of the napkin ideas. After a family summer of navigating plans, hotel rooms, routes, air bnb rules and keypad entry passcodes, reservations, dinner times, I felt tethered to the world of GPS and yelp reviews like never before.
The gifted Pen, set with intention, reminds me that in order to grow, I must continue to write about it about.
As an entrepreneur, speaker-facilitator, creative, writer, I use more paper than in 1981, the fancy Pen is my reminder to be kind to the journey, to be intentional and to find clarity in creativity.
As I refill the Pen that ran out of ink last week, heading into a two hour block of writing time for the next chapter in my book, I energetically release the need to be tethered to my idea of what work looks like in the world.
