Archives for posts with tag: the pen is mightier

We’re Choosing

February 16, 2026 //
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I started down the trail just as my Traveling Partner pinged me a good morning greeting. I slept in this morning (third day in a row) and it was daylight when I left the house. I definitely prefer walking in daylight.

One perspective on a new day.

It is a gray mild morning that barely looks like winter and feels more like Spring. The grass between the vineyard rows is quite green. The distant hills are shades of blue and gray-green, fluffy white clouds nestled in valleys, obscuring the horizon. There are little birds flitting here and there in the grass beside the trail and among the bare tree branches. The adjacent construction site is busy and noisy; I’m unlikely to see deer this morning.

I walked with my thoughts to my halfway point and took a seat. Here I sit with my thoughts, and this sweet solitary moment. Damn, I wish I weren’t in so much pain, though! I sigh to myself. It’s “just” my arthritis this morning, so far. Manageable, for the moment.

I contemplate two clinicians in my life presently. One, my GP, the other my therapist. I am thinking over their very different points of view on digital tools and what that means to me. My GP regularly promotes one app or another for tracking this or that health concern, sometimes dismissing my ability or willingness to track those details without an invasive digital crutch. My therapist, on the other hand, relatively consistently emphasizes the importance of real-world interactions, presence, and analog tools – like pen and paper. (CBT practices definitely have to be practiced in the real world to be effective.)

In a recent conversation, my therapist asked me about creative and contemplative outlets, and when I referenced this writing, he gently reminded me that however authentic and true to my experience, it hardly serves as an outlet for my most private thoughts. He’s not wrong about that. When I later mentioned it to my Traveling Partner he nodded in that affirming way that suggests “well, obviously…” For a woman who once wrote perhaps three times as much, daily, putting personal reflections on page after page, filling blank book after blank book, it is perhaps not enough to limit my writing to this blog and…work.

Choices

I got some really cool stickers at Giftmas time, and for Valentine’s Day my beloved got me more delightful stickers of favorite characters (Bubu and Dudu). I carefully shopped for a blank book with specific characteristics I like for writing: size B5, bound so that it opens flat without breaking the binding, a cover that appeals to a certain something within me that feels relevant to the journey, and a type of paper that feels good to write on. No compromises; I shopped for many weeks until I found what I was looking for. Even the ballpoint pens were carefully chosen to meet my needs and suit my preferences and writing style.

… Stickers and penmanship…

It’s been rather a long while since I wrote my thoughts on actual paper. Doing so serves a different function and meets different needs. I fussed silently over matters of perfection when I contemplated the first page, and of course I immediately made a small mistake (messy handwriting) and crossed it out. Then placed a sticker ever so slightly crooked on the page, enough to annoy me, simultaneously confirming the quality of the adhesive – I can’t remove it to place it straight on the page. I laughed when I saw it this morning. I hope I always laugh when I see it. I’m very human. It is an unimportant detail in the grander scheme of things, and a good lesson.

I didn’t actually write anything yesterday evening, just put a few words on the title page with some meaningful stickers. That was enough.

I think about AI slop and platform decay. I think about how easily practical skills (like handwriting) erode when we don’t use them regularly. AI isn’t helpful for most people; it undermines their cognitive abilities while giving a false sense of achievement. Sure, it’s definitely going to take longer to learn to draw, paint, and animate images using analog tools in the real world, but once we have, we’ve really learned something. Practical real-world skills using actual tools and materials with our own hands is powerful.

Read a real book. Make something real, in the real world. Plant a garden (or a pot of herbs). Sing a song. Walk a trail. Cook a meal. Advance human knowledge. Do something. It’s not about working productively or “gainful employment”, or shareholder profits. It is about living life. An LLM can’t do that for you.

… Your results may vary…

I sigh to myself. Lovely morning. I think about the day ahead. I think about the blank pages of this blank book. It’s a useful metaphor. What will I write on these pages? It is my journey, my story, and I will write each word by hand, myself. There’s a lot of potential and a lot of freedom in that… What will I do with it?

…the new year is a blank page…

The clock is ticking. I have another opportunity to begin again. What about you? What will you write on your blank page? (It’s a metaphor.)

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, art and the artist, Brain Injury, breathe, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, The Art of Being, The Big 5, thoughts on AI, winter, Words

Weapon of Choice

July 17, 2025 //
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I got my walk in this morning, around the neighborhood where the office is located. It’s a pretty middleclass neighborhood, with few sidewalks and lots of lovely landscaping. The summer air was still and smelled of flowers, exotic and vaguely tropical. Very summery. The sun was up and the morning beginning to hint at the heat of the day to come by the time I got back to the office.

…The entire time I was walking, I had a favorite “big beat” track in my head, Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice“…

It was less about the music, this morning, than the words. I kept turning the phrase over in my head, “weapon of choice”… I’d always heard that as meaning “preferred choice of weapon”. This morning it hit me that it also means… choice, as a weapon (or tool). Huh. Words are fun.

We have a ton of choices in life. The menu of the Strange Diner is – in a practical sense – almost unlimited. (Limits we observe are often self-imposed.) Choice is an important tool in our toolbox, whoever we are, regardless of our circumstances. Volumes are written about choice and choosing and how to make choices. What are you choosing? Are your choices taking you where you want to go? Do they make you more the person you most want to be? Are you trapping yourself with foolish choices? Do the choices you choose to make tend to make the world a better place, generally, or… not? I don’t need the answers to these questions (from you) – but maybe you do? (I know what my own answers are, and I ask myself these questions often.)

…Are you even making your own choices, yourself, or are you following some talking head on the internet, or an app, or an “AI”? Are you aware that it matters?…

I sip my coffee thoughtfully. I think my thoughts, grateful for another day to make choices and to practice practices. Grateful that I was finally able to get my Ozempic refilled, and my “sense of things” feels quite ordinary once again; I’ve clearly grown used to the changes it makes in my headspace (the increased impulse control demonstrably extends even to my ability to manage my temper, as it turns out). I breathe, exhale, and relax, feeling filled with contentment and a certain feeling of internal comfort that only seems to come from feeling very “at home in my own skin”. No anxiety, and for the moment no physical pain (which is a pleasant change). No headache. No allergies. Just a pleasant summer morning and a good cup of iced coffee, and this lovely quiet moment that is all mine.

…I am momentarily distracted by the awareness that a lot of my life is captured in words: emails, fragments of unfinished manuscripts, a rare bit of surviving journaling here or there, letters written in the days of snail mail as the only option, and this blog. I find myself wondering if I should be giving thought to preserving any portion of that (the internet may not actually be “forever”, considering current world events, generally)…

I sigh to myself, and my thoughts move on. Who am I? Who was I “then“? What relationship does she have to me, now? Memory is a thin thread that connects our past selves with our present self, and a bit unreliable at times. Does it even matter? Strange thoughts on an ordinary summer workday morning. There’s value in self-reflection, though, and asking the worthy questions is worthwhile whether I answer them or not. They demonstrate thoughtful curiosity and a regard for the unknown. They light the path ahead in some way I can’t easily describe or explain. They hint at what I don’t know, even about myself. Hell, sometimes they stave off the existential dread and doubt that sometimes accompanies awareness of how precious and limited this mortal lifetime is. I hear that metaphorical clock ticking.

The weekend is coming. What will I do with it? I’ve got a camping trip planned for a couple weeks from now. What will I do with that? I’ve got choices. So do you. What will you choose?

Every choice is a new beginning – even if you choose to stand still and do nothing.

One day I will not wake to begin again… It’s how mortality works. There is much to savor in each waking moment, and less to struggle with than I sometimes choose.
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Categories 2024 Election, Allegories, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Practices, Summer, The Art of Being, War and News of War, Words

Filling the Blank Page

January 14, 2015 //
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I’ve had some inspired moments that left me urgently wanting to write, recently, but the timing was poor and the moment was not at hand; the ideas have since slipped away. Some mornings I wake feeling inspired to write, other mornings it is my morning meditation that inspires me…still others, I face a blank page for an eternity of minutes, until making an observation about that experience, itself, is what remains. (Guess what sort this morning has turned out to be? lol)

I keep a journal. My most private, uncensored, unfiltered, uninvestigated, unverified, stream-of-consciousness reflections on my experience are written there, ideally where they do no harm. I have many dozens of bound volumes reflecting on various details of my life over time, and at one point they were displayed on bookcases as a singular body of written work; there was something strangely powerful about standing midst the many varied volumes, understanding that even so many were only a small slice of my individual experience in a mortal lifetime. Change happens. Most of those volumes are now locked away, for space-saving and aesthetic reasons, and changes in what I need to hold on to as I have changed, myself. In high school I wrote with structure and discipline, in the evening, once daily, at the end of the day. Later, I wrote in a somewhat irregular way, because the Army didn’t make it an easy thing to find time to write. Domestic violence drove my writing ‘underground’; my journal was secured in a safe deposit box at a nearby bank that I felt reasonably certain my husband-at-the-time did not frequent. Opportunities to write freely, then, were very rare, and the writing seemed fairly desperate.

After my first marriage ended, and I moved into my own place, my writing (in my journal) exploded into a very large part of my experience, and the many dozens of volumes began piling up. I was going through blank books every 6 weeks or so, and writing about everything I could think to. Since then, on and off I’ve gone through periods of near-continuous writing that don’t exactly seem ‘inspired’ as much as … driven. Then I stopped. Just…stopped. For a long while I didn’t write at all, almost two years, I think. Eventually, I’d write one day, say nothing,  then it would be days, weeks, months before I ‘tried again’. I had ‘lost my voice’. It pained me. I was ‘stuck’ and uninspired, and also feeling that I urgently needed to say something. I was in a very bad place. Life continued to go on around me, and certainly I continued to reflect on it…but I’d lost a powerful ally on a lonely journey: myself. Words matter. Mine matter to me. I read what I write. I had stopped writing. I had stopped listening. There seemed no other choice to me, then; what I was saying on those pages wasn’t helpful. I considered burning them all, every volume, every page, every word. I’m still not sure why…and I’m still not sure it’s a bad idea.

The closer I got to turning 50, the more it hurt me to feel so silenced. I wasn’t painting, either. I felt shutdown, diminished, and impaired. I ended many days thinking “well, this has likely run its course then, hasn’t it?” about my life, and wondering what to do about that feeling.

...and usually with a cup of coffee.

…and usually with a cup of coffee.

Here I am on the other side of all that. I write most days, here, and less regularly in my journal – and it’s digital these days. Mindfulness practices, meditation, and improving my understanding of the neuroscience of emotion has taken me a long way from that dark place. I’ve been finding life worth living for a long while, now, without any requirement that it be ‘perfect’. I feel disappointed less often. The rare days I really struggle with anxiety, fearfulness, or that bleak feeling of utter futility, are those when my PTSD is clearly causing me problems, or when I’m fatigued and having more challenges with my head injury than I do when I am well-rested.

The writing is a metaphor inasmuch as there are characteristics of that experience that point out how varied the human experience can be: driven, broken, emotional, stoic, programmed, helpless…and also loving, compassionate, supportive, adventurous, romantic, exciting… mindful. It’s been these new practices of mindfulness that have benefited me most, and the rest of life’s lessons tend to build on that, these days, by improving my experience day-to-day, or highlighting missed practices, or needful changes, using less favorable outcomes to show the way. I’ve learned that living is not about filling the blank page, as much as choosing what to write with care, and that writing is one of the things I do to take care of me.

Today is a good day to write words about writing. Today is a good day to smile, and enjoy who I am – who we each are. Today is a good day to be kind, to be considerate, and to value my most private joys as highly as those I share.

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Categories Free Will, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, The Big 5, Turning 50, Words