The Dilemma of Enjoying Fountain Pens

is, what happens when one has no more to write? Do I put the pen down or - and what is worse? -
risk flagrant frivolity? Ten pages full of practice signatures anticipating future relevance. But what, in the absence of something clear to say, are the alternatives to autographs that allow me to keep writing? I am not saying, of course, that such is my perpetual state. But it does happen sometimes, this dilemma.

One solution I am continually relearning is to write to sharpen attention to this world and the One who created and indwells it. Untamed observation. Because, as is the case so often, the first dilemma contains within it a second deeper one: the sometimes invisible-to-me presumption that control and certainty are prerequisites to writing well, when the opposite is closer to my experience of the truth. That is to say, that control and certainty have more than suitable replacements in mystery and gratitude is a beautiful gift I keep unwrapping and then forgetting and then reopening again.

To know how it all should go, it turns out, can be a wholly unnecessary burden, for writing.

And maybe also for other things.