Thursday, December 15, 2016

Something Worth Writing

Like many others perhaps, I all too readily consent to various distractions when I ought to focus. Electronic gadgets and digital media particularly attract. Yet I find numerous non-electronic, non-digital distractions as well — writing instruments, for example. Inclined to fountain pens, I have several; and I spend overly much time nearly every day writing meaningless sentences to experiment with them to try to determine which one I like best based on color of ink, width of stroke, “grip” of nib, heft of barrel. The pleasures in connecting movement of hand and flow of words on paper are variously real according to which pen, but I waste time when I should be making progress and producing results of substance. I chide myself even as I continue to dither. Acutely, I realize that what would be nice would be to resolve a point in the experimentation. That is, while a desirable tool would be a nice “to have” — a most appealing pen — far better would it be to have purpose in having the instrument at all, namely, something worth writing.