Intro

What are you thankful for? Take a second to think …  Got it? …  Whatever it is, I’d bet it’s not your ballpoint pen. But maybe it should be. It’s an I Heart This mini-episode this week. I’m Ben Lord. Let’s talk about what we love.  

Counterargument

As a guy who’s work focuses on gratitude, I’m in the habit of asking people what they’re thankful for. It’s really a wonderful thing to make a habit of. And I’d recommend it to anyone. 

People’s answers are often surprising. But there are definite patterns to what people say–things that you can expect to hear over and over again. When asked in a big, open-ended way like that, People can be expected to say things like their health. Their families. Good work. Running water and electricity. And a loving spouse or partner. Nobody yet has told me that they’re grateful for ballpoint pens. 

But … I am! And I think, if more people knew about their awesomeness or thought about their benefits, and the miracle of writing in general. they would at least get casual mention.   

Affirm the goodness

For pretty close to 99% of human time … 99% ! … nobody could send a note, make a list, or keep a journal. It simply wasn’t possible. We just didn’t have the tools. We lived in a world without writing at all. 

Think, for a moment of the implications of this. If you can read and write, you are one of the fewer than 7% of all people ever who could.  

And it really is miraculous what that allows you to do. Yes! Yes! It allows us to capture a more accurate picture of what happened in the past that isn’t changed or eroded by the vagaries of memory. And, yes, it allows us as a species to build on our knowledge over time and transmit it forward. These are absolutely stunning achievements and I’m not making light of them, but these are the things that scholars always point out.

I want you to turn your attention to what the ability to write does for you personally, concretely, on an everyday afternoon. You see, one of the fundamental problems of human thinking and of human life in general is that we can only think of 2-3 things at the same time. Sure, we have a brain full of memories. Sure, we have a cacophony of sensory information bombarding us at any given moment. But our minds (or at least the part of them that scientists call our working memory) are small. Go ahead, try grocery shopping without a list. Go ahead, try adding 957 + 276 + 469 in your head. I bet you can’t even remember the numbers themselves. But if you have a pen and a piece of paper? You have instantly become a hundred times smarter. You can probably solve the problem in less than a minute. And that’s not the only problem you can solve. What do angsty teenagers do when they can’t handle the angst of unrequited love, societal expectations, and raging hormones. (Well, okay, some of them do drugs.) But the ones that I know mostly write poetry. Whether our problems are mathematical or emotional, many of them are too big for our tiny minds–unless we write them down. And suddenly, even heartbreak feels more manageable.  

For my adult life I have kept journals and notebooks. I’ve written poems and books and essays in them, yes. But I’ve also written my way out of the vicious thought-spirals of my own anxieties and occasional depressions. Something about getting all that repetitive garbage in one place where I can see it all, helps me to diffuse it. And it is in my notebooks that I am most creative. I can capture quotes and ideas and questions and hold them up against each other, a kind of parallax of thought that makes new combinations stand out.

For me, it is usually through writing that I know my own mind. 

Acknowledge the Source

Like I said before, there was no writing for 99% of all human time. We tend to think of writing as something that was invented at the dawn of civilization. (Indeed, we say that the advent of writing is the dawn of history.) but even in the intervening 5,000 years since someone first started scratching cuneiform into clay, almost nobody could write. A few scribes here, a few monks there, maybe some high-class aristocrats. 

In an age when people are used to thinking of information technologies as all being electronic, it is easy to forget that the tools it takes to write a grocery list took some five thousand years to develop. Even just a few centuries ago writing was an inaccessible, expensive, time consuming labor. 

For three thousand years, most writing was done in the mud. And if you wanted to carry it somewhere, you’d have to turn it into a brick. Later, people upgraded to parchment made of animal skins. A single page would have taken days of human labor to make, not to mention how many animals it would have taken to make a book. Making paper took centuries of innovation to be cost-effective and only became widespread in the 1400s. Inks were usually made from oak galls and rusted iron, and if you wanted any color but black, you’d pay dearly and it might have to come from thousands of miles away. 

The quill pens that Hogwarts makes look so romantic, are a complete pain to write with. They drip ink everywhere and you can only write a few letters before you need to dip into the inkwell again. The metal-nibbed dip pens were worlds better, though still annoying. Fountain pens, ingeniously, put the ink inside the pen itself, and usually, all over your hand. The ball-point pen wasn’t invented until 1930, and it took three decades for the leaks and ball-problems to get worked out, and for them to become cheap enough to become what you and I might write with today. 

So, go to the drawer and get your favorite pen. What did it cost you? Maybe a few dollars if it was a really nice one. Grab a sheet of paper. What did that cost you? Less than a cent, I’ll wager. Each of them was the cooperative labor of thousands of people across half a world. 

Now think of how many years it took you to learn to use these simple tools with the alacrity that you do. Without a thought, you can capture any word that comes out of your head. Even hundreds or thousands of them in an hour. 

Conclusion 

I have no shade to throw on those who prefer the keyboard. It is undoubtedly faster. But I will always love writing with a pen. I know exactly the one I want. It writes so smoothly, leaving a clear mark with the slightest touch. Even though the mark is clear, the line is fine. Less than half a millimeter. The bearing at its tip is so small that I can barely see it. 

With a pen in hand, my writing is not confined to the lines. My notebooks are full of charts and marginalia. Arrows connect thoughts across the page. Sometimes there’s a sketch. And my pen flies at just the right speed, fast enough to capture it all, slow enough to give me space to reflect. This simple set of tools, my inheritance of millenia of scholars before me, helping me with each scratch upon the page, to discover what I think and who I am. 

Closing

“If this episode made you think a little differently about your pen, your paper, or the way you process the world — share it with someone who still keeps a notebook close. Or better yet, write them a note telling them why you liked it. That’s how this show grows — one thoughtful connection at a time.

And if you’re feeling especially generous, take a second to leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. Others only discover the show when someone recommends it to them.”

I Heart This is written, edited, and produced by me, Ben Lord. Our logo was designed by Briony Morrow-Cribbs. Our website is iheartthispodcast.com. You can email me at ben@iheartthispodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening. And, as always, Be kind. Be curious, and be thankful.