Holding on and letting go — the old fountain pen writes of connectedness, collaboration and shared promises

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FALLS CHURCH, Va. — When I was in Junior High School my parents and I had a yearly ritual beginning with the first September of the Seventh Grade. I got to pick out a new Esterbrook fountain pen. Learning to fill it with ink, the blue black river of unshaped words, was a thrill I obviously have not forgotten.

Just me, and a blank piece of paper, and my pen working together to find out what I was thinking about.

(David Smith-Soto/Borderzine.com)

(David Smith-Soto/Borderzine.com)

And here I am, today, like a faithless lover, hitting the flat, two dimensional letters on my I pad, having already reviewed an article from the N.Y. Times, responded to my e-mail and laughed for a moment or two at the family photos sent via Message from my son.

Next to me in a clear plastic jar, the cleaned and re-commissioned ex container of frozen vanilla gelato, rests my Bexley fountain pen, ink dried since my last attempt a month ago to write by hand in the leather journal I bought two years ago. I will rinse the pen, and put in a new cartridge, and scribble a paragraph or two. But not right now. And not later today.

Why do I keep it at all? And why did I go through three months of impatient complaining trying to get delivery of a roller ball pen that I’ve used three times since I finally received it before the end of last year? What am I hanging onto? What is this inner struggle about?

Eric Hoffer had the answer to that question in the title of his best-known book, The Ordeal of Change. I read it long ago when all I wanted was whatever was new. I read it, and I thought I understood it, and of course I did understand it within the context of who I was then, young, full of the beginnings of adulthood, unencumbered by the consequences of choosing and aging, the complex collusion and collision of free will and inevitability.

I can’t keep up. That’s what its all about Alfie. Keeping up. And learning how to go from being the youngest kid in your class to the oldest one in your group without wasting precious time looking for the non-existent re-set button, feeling like you knew more at 21 than you do now. If knowing is about how to make things fit, than that’s right. I do know less now. Some days, nothing seems to fit.

Certain realities bug me more than others. The cluster that bugs me is probably different from the cluster that bugs you, but being bugged by things we can’t change is a feeling most of us experience from time to time.

What’s got me lop sided at the moment is how many projects I’ve got going, and how they reflect what I romantically call my “kaleidoscopic” mind, but someone else with a more traditional and less indulgent view might reasonably call my “monkey brain”.

Maybe that really is the fundamental change that I’m wrestling with. I learned to go from A to Z in a functional straight line, measurable process with beginnings and endings and new beginnings. I didn’t much like it, and I wasn’t always very good at it, but I learned how to do it.

That alphabet sequence, row after row of students in chairs memorizing dates and numbers was the way I learned. Like my pen, that was then.

Now is a moment leveraged into time and space, into everywhere and everyone at once. I can take a photo and throw it, not into a mindless wind, but into directed streams of information designed to reach an audience of people who have as their only connection, me. They can send it on to people I will never know. And I can make these connections with a “phone” that rests comfortably in the pocket of my shirt.

Keeping up? Maybe learning how to live and learn while feeling scattered is keeping up.

What if how I was taught in school was an unintended misdirection of attention? I was taught that understanding and fixing this world, it’s convolutions and revolutions, was dependent on collecting, organizing and mastering information piece by piece, step by step. Clearly, that doesn’t work. There is no straight line between cognition and revelation. The complexity of life destroys straight lines.

That’s what keeps my insides pretzeling. We live on the edge of the miraculous but we got here before we were ready for it. We act as if the process of evolution is a straight line and has completed itself with us. “Old school” is all we need to know. We ignore this simple truth: the wonderful human creature we want to be isn’t in the latest “Ten Steps to a Better You” book. No, that beautiful being we want to be is waiting for its turn on earth some hundreds of years from now.

Our over riding obligation is to those people, our children’s children and beyond.

We have to let go of our need for final answers, and let go of what used to work, the “my tribe versus your tribe” story we all grew up with. We have to live into the scattered reality of today, understanding that we are all unfinished parts of this human process. That’s where this web leads, to a life of connectedness, collaboration and shared promises.

One thought on “Holding on and letting go — the old fountain pen writes of connectedness, collaboration and shared promises

  1. Even my mother was surprised when I came home from school with a Penmanship Certificate in the third grade. I think she chuckled when I handed it to her adding I didn’t know why. But when I graduated from UC Berkeley she gave me her cherished White Dot Sheaffer Snorkel fountain pen. I lost that beautiful pen but have been writing with a fountain pen in a myriad of journals with various fountain pens ever since. I buy a new journal every year, a nice one not always leather, but that has good paper for real ink. I also like roller ball pens with gel ink, but even my Mont Blanc ballpoint will do. One of each is in my surrogate attache right along side of my MacBook Air.

    I think it is the guilt of the loss that cherished pen fosters in me that keeps me enjoying writing in my journals. When my mother was on her deathbed she asked if there was anything I would especially like; I told her the only thing I wanted was the Mont Blanc I gave her thirty years before to make up for the loss of that Sheaffer Pen with my first paycheck as the Official Court Interpreter of US District Court in El Paso Texas.

    I carry that Mont Blanc in my backpack portable office hesitant to lend it when someone happens to see me writing while they fumble around without a pen for some spontaneous note. I break out in a sweat when I misplace it from time to time. I have thought about buying another one to retire “hers” but I haven’t, yet. She remains alive and with me each and every time I pull out that pen to jot some “pearl” that remains chaotically stored in good old paper journals until one of those moments when I open one at random and surprise myself.

    I was heartened last week when I saw a professor of political science from Edmonton at a conference in Montreal Quebec taking all his notes with a fountain pen he tenderly took out, made his notes returned the cover carefully then put it in his coat until the next salient note had to be made and repeated the ceremony.

    That professor used black ink; I must have blue ink always.

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