As I sat down to write today, I noticed the pile of pen pieces sitting near the edge of my desk. I had cleaned a few of my fountain pens last night and left them out to air dry and hadn't had a chance to put them away yet. Cleaning my pens every few weeks at night is something of a calming ritual.

I've written about my usage of fountain pens over the years on Hive and that network which must not be named whence Hive came. Fountain pens have the image of being relics of past. Often the only time we've even seen them is in old movies from the 1950s or earlier or similarly old cartoons like Tom & Jerry. We think of them as being as outdated as using quill and parchment. They don't have the best of images.

^{Photo by David Pennington on Unsplash}

The reality, however, is that they are not only still around, but they function better than ever. They don't shoot out ink as easily as those old cartoons would have you believe—that old filling system long ago gave way to better ones—but in every other way, they work much better. They have become the writing device of choice for many professional writers, Stephen King and Neal Gaiman among them. It's not hard to see why. Unlike ball points or gel pens which require you to push down a little or a lot to make a line, fountain pens are designed to flow with no pressure at all, all that is required is guiding the pen. This makes it easy to write for hours without any hand tiredness, something that plagues ballpoint users.

I remember in high school we had to handwrite an essay test. This was only in the late 90s so not that long ago, but I'm sure they don't do it anymore and use computers instead. Anyway, every few minutes you would see someone put their pen down and shake their tired hand, trying to ward off a cramp or relieve tight muscle. This is a problem that doesn't exist with fountain pens. In fact, if you do apply the same pressure to a fountain pen as you would a ballpoint, you'd probably damage the nib.

For all the good points of fountain pens, there is a downside. Cleaning. Fountain pen ink need to be cleaned sometimes. Because of their design, a tiny clog from dried ink or dust or something else can stop the ink from flowing. To prevent this from happening, it's a good idea to clean them every now and again when changing or refilling ink. In other words, routine cleaning keeps them running smoothly. Not unlike a car. Most people hate the cleaning and put it off as long as possible. I like it.

^{Image by Patrizio from Pixabay}

Cleaning can be the perfect time for practicing mindfulness. No TV, no youtube, no music playing, nothing except you and the cleaning. For fountain pens it's a good idea to take them apart as much as you can or as much as you feel comfortable doing so. Some people are scared of breaking certain parts if they do it wrong, but generally I take apart everything, then I clean them one by one, putting all my awareness on what I'm doing.

But it's soooooo boring people usually whine. This is a complaint I am very familiar with because it's the same complaint I hear about meditation. My reply there is usually something like "That's a feature not a bug". Actually I am usually a little stronger and tell them "that's the point". It's not the point in cleaning fountain pens, but something of the same idea could apply here.

The human mind doesn't like to stand still. It wants to always be bouncing around between ideas and other stimulation, like a monkey hopping from branch to branch. We call this monkey mind in Buddhism. This trait may have been a big advantage in humans' past, but it works against us in the modern world. The result of this evolutionary baggage is that whenever we try to focus on something our mind gets antsy and wants to quickly get moving again. This sensation we call boredom.

It may not be entirely accurate to set it up as an either/or situation, but it's not a bad way of looking at it: on one end of the attention line we have focus and boredom and on the other end we have excitement and mindlessness, or perhaps more modernly attention deficit disorder. Although for much of recorded history we as a species seem to have been making progress on moving towards the focus end of this line, in recent decades the monkey in all our heads has definitely been pulling us back towards the mindlessness side. Nowhere can we see this more than in reading.

I think most of us used to have the ability to sit still long enough to finish some long-form reading: a magazine piece or a short story or maybe just a long chapter in a novel. But these days? How many people find it difficult to even read a single page without giving in to the urge to check our phone to see if we got any likes on Instagram? The internet and monkey mind have a lot in common. Many people much smarter than myself have spoken of the internet metaphorically as the collective human mind. Well, there are two sides to every coin. And the bad side to this one is with a collective human mind, we have a collective monkey mind to deal with too. Right now we are losing the battle against it.

Anyway, I checked to see if the pens I had cleaned the night before were dry yet, then carefully and slowly put the pieces together before sticking them in their storage box. I reflected on how calming this process is, both the cleaning and the reassembling. There is something really pleasant about it, about being in the moment. And that's why I keep doing this little ritual.

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.