Hello brave bunny 🐰

I've had a lot on my mind lately. Whenever I'm not writing, I'm dipping my toe in Perth's hairy housing market, getting my mess in order while stressing about my digital carbon footprint, or satisfying my cravings for cold weather foods (meet my best friends: salt and fat) while minding my exercise and cholesterol.
https://sanlive.com/digitalminimalism/
https://www.wholegraindigital.com/digitaldeclutter/

Two things, however, are bringing me relief right now. One is a quiet, low-pressure semi-solitary game of Minecraft. The other is a growing obsession with fountain pens.

I'd like to give you a romantic story about how I was always drawn to fountain pens until a villain from Pen Island destroyed my bla-bla with colonial capillary action... but I can't. I hated fountain pens for many years because they were a) scratchy, b) messy, and c) complicated. To me, they were just a thing we had to use in school because gel pens weren't invented yet.
http://nevertoocurious.com/2015/03/05/capillary-action/

I think my change of heart began in 2012, when someone I admired tweeted about their love for fountain pens. How could a sensible human person actually find enjoyment in these bloody things? I had to find out.

So, I bought my first fountain pen of adulthood, a cheap plastic Noodlers where you twist the butt to draw ink into an inner chamber. And then I committed THE CARDINAL SIN (altho since this is a n00b mistake, maybe we should call it an "ordinal sin" 🤔)...

I filled my fountain pen with calligraphy ink. It's the worst thing you can do because calligraphy ink contains sticky particles that forever clog up the tiny grooves inside the pen. But I didn't know this at the time, and so I hated on fountain pens for another decade because my now-ruined Noodlers utterly sucked.

Since hitting middle age, I've been questioning my assumptions about the world. We grow up with ideas about how things are (and how they should be), and merrily we roll along until we hit a wall. Now, I've hit many walls — with relationships, jobs, fitness pursuits, etc. — and I gotta tell ya, it hurts every time. Imagine if you could self-correct before impact. How much more energy would you have in reserve because you're not spending it on damage control?

Writing instruments seemed like a non-threatening, non-confrontational way to start re-evaluating my life. I took a month to re-train the way I hold a pen (not as hard as it sounds, but you will feel pain), vowed to only use appropriate ink, and gave this tool another go.

Three months later, I am now the Pen Island villain of my household, with an army of minions consisting of three fountain pens and seven bottles of ink. Writing by hand is a soothing and sensory affair with a pleasurable amount of scratch transmitted through the nerve endings in my fingers. And because I bothered to learn what to do, the experience is no longer messy or complicated. Fountain pen life has become a tiny oasis of order amidst the chaos.

And they say you can't teach an old a still very young and vibrant dog new tricks.

What's something you've challenged that led you to doing things differently? How did that turn out? What did you learn from the experience?

Hit reply and tell me.

Your friendly Pen Island villain,
Sandy.
sanlive.com

🤔

I've been learning about mind gardens. They're what happens when blogging and personal note-taking decide to have a baby on the internet: You and your mind garden.
https://nesslabs.com/mind-garden

Old new from 2019: Going digital might not be as sustainable as we originally thought.
https://theconversation.com/for-a-greener-future-we-must-accept-theres-nothing-inherently-sustainable-about-going-digital-128125

"Managers spend 85% of the day in meetings, on the phone or talking to people about work, not doing it," says Newport. "It’s flexible and adaptive, but conflicts with the way that the human brain operates. Those context shifts are devastating and burn you out."
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190715-how-to-escape-the-hyperactive-hivemind-of-modern-work

👩🏻‍💻

Finally, here's what I'm up to now.
https://sanlive.com/now